Depressed and Quite Happy!

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Irish Voice Entertainment

Depressed and Quite Happy!

January 16, 2008

By Mike Farragher

PETE Depressed is anything but. The lead singer of the Gobshites is a jolly looking, frantic soul in search of a good time, and the good times always seem to follow this Boston band. Fans of their acoustic punk mix are rabid.

A busload of them braved hellacious weather to make it down to the CelticLounge Christmas party last month at Connolly’s, where I first encountered them.

Not since Johnny Cash or the Violent Femmes has a musical outfit been able to stir up such menace using nothing more than an acoustic guitar. Their set is loud, ragged, and packed with drinking anthems, which is just the way the crowd liked it.

Apart from original tunes like “Can’t Drink Here,” “Alcohol,” “It’s Friday” and the classic “I Only Drink Stout,” they did sloppy, irreverent covers of the Pogues’ “Streams of Whiskey” (a sloppy, irreverent song to begin with) and the Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues.”

Pete is a fascinating character, with many industry stories from his time as a music industry insider. He “worked” Black 47 albums up in Boston for EMI in the early nineties and routinely pulls groups together to make compilation CDs that showcase folk, rock, and punk.

Here’s how our talk went:

How would you describe the Gobshites to someone who has never heard the band?

Picture Johnny Ramone joining the Pogues but playing acoustic guitar in the same style that he played his mosrite guitar. That’s the Gobshites in a nutshell for you.

I wanted the same wall of sound but with all acoustic instruments. So instead of one guitar and a wall of Marshall amps, we do it with accordion, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, guitar, tin whistle, bass and drums.

You might think of us like the Pogues, backwards. They would take Irish songs and punk them up. We often take old punk songs like “Six Pack” by Black Flag and turn it into an Irish sing-a-long!

It doesn’t appear on the surface that those elements would mix, but they do!

I think punk, rock, and folk music are pretty much the same thing with a similar attitude. I have a series of shows I put together in Boston called ”pUnKs aRe FoLkS tOo!,” where punk singers play acoustic and in the round.

So we just keep blurring the lines. Someday, folks will be singing the Ramones’ “Somebody Put Something in My Drink” and think it might have been an old Dubliners number.

What are your influences?

The obvious ones are the Pogues and Ramones, but I’ve gotten inspired by CDs like John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow, Elvis Costello’s King of America and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

How did you get your start?

I’d been playing in a punk band called Meat Depressed when I told Larry Kirwan from Black 47 that I was starting an Irish band. I showed him the logo that John Holmstrom from Punk Magazine had drawn for me and he booked us open for Black 47 in Boston.

The only problem was that I didn’t have a band yet; I was just putting the ideas together. So I asked some guys who had played in MD in the past to do the show. We did a few trad songs, an original and a bunch of punk rock songs about drinking turned into Irish songs.

If I didn’t have to rush to get that show together we might have sounded completely different! Larry dubbed us the Gobshites and the name stuck.

Lots of drinking references on your original songs and your covers. Explain.

We just want to have a good time. It’s a party whenever we show up.

We’re the Jimmy Buffet of Irish music. It’s a whole drinking culture, but we’re more of the bar hopping than island hopping crowd, and we don’t need no stinking parrots! You can’t help but drink along to a Gobshites CD.

Many of your songs deal with the three Ds — drunk, drinking, and the DTs...wow! Are you looking to branch out on your next disc? Perhaps espouse the benefits of coke and heroin?

No. We are very anti drug. Well, birth control pills and Viagracome in handy, but other than that we like to stick to the basics.Beer, beer, beer and whiskey. The three CDs we have out now are mostly punk rock covers.

Your fans seem like an extremely fun bunch! What kind of community have you built up around the band?

It’s very cult like. The women are only allowed to sleep with me. They must bring ceremonial Guinness to the front of the stage and offer it up to us. They wear their Gobshites t-shirts all the time.

Truthfully, they are a great bunch of folks, carpooling, offering places for each other to stay for out of town shows, buying rounds for each other and us.

Hell, if I wasn’t me, I’d be a fan of us, just so I can hang out with them.

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