LIMERICK’S lost boys The Hitchers will celebrate 25 years since their debut album at Dolans Warehouse on Saturday October 28.
In the meantime the band is participating in this week’s Culture Night activities presenting Pencil-Drawn Punk – the Adventures of a 90’s Limerick Indie Band at Lucky Lane, Catherine Street, a pop-up exhibition for two hours from 5pm to 7pm this Friday September 23.
The one-night-only exhibition includes themes such as “Social Media 1995 an under-the-bonnet look at how a band with no budget communicated with its supporters and they with them in those pre-internet days – while “From Biros to Bytes” shows how the artwork on their releases and promotional materials developed from doodles, sketches and photocopy montages to engaging with daunting emerging desktop technologies like photoshop and quark.
Niall from The Hitchers says, “Expect to meet some of the stars of The Hitchers no-budget music videos which still went on to be shown on TV shows like RTEs No Disco and MTVs Alternative Nation. There’s loads on in Limerick for Culture Night and we’ve no intention of competing for attention with any of it so we’re on early. Come along. There may even be a couple of songs sung.”
“Pencil-Drawn Punk is a short, sharp, deep dive into memorabilia. Those old boxes of junk in the attic, the stuff that other bands might’ve thrown out years ago – and perhaps should have. We didn’t have a wealthy label or many of the support structures even our unsigned peers at the time had available. There was no budget for PR, marketing, promotion, videos etc. So anything we could do in that line had to be done pretty much in-house with whatever skills and resources we had available within the group.”
