The Rubber Wellies will get another outing next Tuesday in Kilkenny.
But this time around it’s the turn of the Harry Bird-fronted folk band rather than their namesakes, the waterproof galoshes which have been a staple of many rain-drenched summer festivals.
Based between Dublin and Bilbao, Harry Bird and the Rubber Wellies is a group of folksters featuring Edinburgh born guitarist Harry Bird, alongside fiddler Cristophe Capewell and singer Maria Blackwell.
Having kicked the summer off with a tour of Ireland, including gigs at the Body and Soul Solstice Festival and the Flat Lake Festival, the band have announced the last of their Irish gigs for 2010, including a stop off in Kilkenny.
They will play the Cellar Sessions in Matt the Millers on John Street next Tuesday, September 14, as well as gigs in Clonakilty, Cork, Cavan and Dublin.
The group released their debut album, ‘Long Way To Be Free’, in December 2009 and have been touring almost non-stop through the UK, Ireland, Spain and parts of Europe since then.
The musical collaboration between Bird and Sheffield’s Capewell stretches back almost 10 years, when they used to busk and attend folk sessions as students in the north-east of England.
Capewell was later influenced by the traditional Irish music scene he came across while living in Barcelona and was inspired to set up home in Dublin, where he came across singer Blackwell.
The trio were first united on stage in 2008 while touring with a German pop band and the success of this saw them continue their collaboration as Chincho por Tatou, a Basque circus band accompanying a group of trapeze artists in fiestas and festivals around Spain.
They continued under the guise of Harry Bird and the Rubber Wellies, recording a homegrown collection of songs exploring love, faith and displacement in a world made up of contradictions on their debut album.
They have since received airplay on RTÉ Radio 1, BBC Radio 2 and 2XM and are currently involved in the British Arts Council project ‘Songs of the Sea’ with Gwyneth Herbert. For more information visit www.myspace.com/harrybirdsongs
