THIS Tuesday December 20, Limerick punk band The Hitchers bring the curtain down on the 25th anniversary of It’s All Fun and Games Til Someone Loses an Eye with a festive celebration at The Record Room, Limerick which will include, The Hitchers Pencil Drawn Punk exhibition, live performances of songs from Fun and Games and beyond featuring some members of The Hitchers and their friends.
The Hitchers re-released Fun & Games on vinyl in 2022 and this was marked with a gig in their hometown that featured the line-up that recorded the album as well as guest performers CBS Pipe Band and vocalist Aoife Harney, who had recorded her performance on the albums closing track at the age of just nine.
Pencil Drawn Punk
Pencil-Drawn Punk – the Adventures of a 90’s Limerick Indie Band – this pop-up 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. Also 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.
Founding member and main songwriter for The Hitchers, Niall Quinn says, “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.”
The Hitchers
Releasing two albums and a slew of EPs in the late 90’s The Hitchers came to the attention of legendary BBC DJ John Peel who championed the bands debut UK release It’s All Fun & Games Til Someone Loses An Eye and had the band record a session for his show that gets repeat broadcasts to the present day.
The ‘Strachan/You Can Only Love Someone’ double a-side single won many more friends, plaudits and award nominations (pipped to the Best Irish Single gong by Ash’ A Life Less ordinary …no shame in that) as did the bands follow up LP ‘For The Want of Some Better TV’ and the band were an ever present on the gigging circuits of Ireland and Britain earning a reputation for spikey punk-pop, acerbic, witty lyricism, terrace-chant chorus’ and ultimately for fiery live performances.
