Covid interrupted, the band played on. Now, Wildfire are ready to light up Cork Arts Theatre
Back in 2020, Wildfire Guitar Club was ready to take to the CAT club for a three-night run in aid of Pieta House. Then the pandemic struck and upended everything. This week they're finally returning.
The first time you hear a band you’ve never heard before there’s always that moment before they hit the first chord and take off into a sonic space where you wonder, what will they sound like?
All the more so with a seven-strong guitar band, all composed of amateur musicians. I mean anyone can play guitar, right? Or can they?
The síbín
For the past 18 months or so, every Wednesday night from September to June, the seven members of the Wildfire Guitar Club make the pilgrimage to the backyard of Patrick Cotter's house in Rochestown, where he has a little shed out the back that's just the perfect size for seven musicians.
Before it became the unofficial headquarters for Wildfire, Patrick's kids, now adults, spent long hours hanging out in the "síbín." It's the kind of prototypical men's shed/síbín hangout: there's a fridge, movie posters, a few family photos, novelty posters for beer, souvenirs from overseas holidays and flags of the world bunting. It's the kind of shed that many people probably wished they had, or possibly even built, during the pandemic—a little escape as the apocalypse (or what felt like it) closed in.
It's also a really good spot, as it turns out, to jam. The sound inside the shed is really, really good. Or maybe it's the musicians + the intimate, timber-walled space
The six members of Wildfire who were in the shed the night I showed up at the end of April didn't hang around. They arrived at around 8:20 pm, exchanged pleasantries, tuned up their guitars, put capos on, and by 8:30 pm, it was showtime. For the next 90 minutes, they cycled through about a dozen songs for their upcoming three-night run at the CAT Club.
So, how did they sound?
That night, they opened with The Doobie Brothers' "Listen to the Music", and by the time the first verse dovetailed into the chorus of “Whoa, oh listen to the music " it was pretty damn clear that this guitar club could play and sing.
Origin story
Wildfire started back at the tail end of 2016, around four years after Ballincollig's Whitehorse Guitar Club, a bigger and now nationally known group, got going. In fact, Eamon Dwyer, the unofficial Wildfire band leader, talked with some of the crew from Whitehorse about possibly starting a Whitehorse franchise. But that idea fizzled out and Eamon went solo and stuck up a callout on Facebook announcing a new guitar group. At that time, there was no name, just a simple enough idea: to play music - on guitars - together.
About three or four musicians came on the first night, Eamon recalled. While there's no audition as such, musicians quickly figure out if they're right for the group. Since 2019, Wildfire has been a crew of seven, ranging in age from (young) 30s to 60s. Everyone plays a string instrument, but in many ways, they're a disparate bunch. Two are retired, two are related, and one is newly married. Several are parents. Music unites them.
As they're tuning up, Eamon tells me that the impetus for starting the guitar club was predominantly the social aspect and to keep playing the instrument.
"We're all able to play, we're all able to sing and play, and it was kind of, you know, an organised outlet, really.
"We weren't looking to become rock stars, like, all over again or anything," he adds to some good-natured laughter.
"But the thing is that we kind of hit on this idea after a while of this charity angle, and that gives us a real purpose to do something once or twice a year."
In the past, they've played CAT Club gigs to fundraise for the Mercy Hospital Foundation and Crumlin Children's Hospital; they've also played at a charity day at Laya Healthcare.
Covid, however, severely interrupted their endeavors, both the charity gigs and also the social aspect of playing together on a weekly basis.
The money raised from this year's gigs, including from the raffle held on each of the three nights, will be donated to Pieta House. The penultimate night of their three-night run comes just before Darkness into Light, in which thousands of people across the country will awaken early to walk together and raise money for the charity, which helps those in suicidal distress as well as those bereaved by suicide.
"Pieta and Darkness into Light will be high in people's consciousness," Patrick said. "And we're hoping that all of that then will help us to raise a few bob."
It's been a long lead-in to this gig. Wildfire has had a lot of time to nail the setlist, and it's definitely a catholic selection. It also represents a group whose ages range across a generation.
Showtime
So, what is in the setlist?
“It’s a mix of older rock, such as The Doobie Brothers and Simon and Garfunkel,” Karl O’Flynn explains. “But then it veers into more modern stuff. We’ve got The Killers, George Ezra, Snow Patrol, Eddie Vedder.”
Bell X1 also feature on the setlist as well as Lady A, and American country singer Michael Martin Murphey, whose best-known song, "Wildfire," is the provenance of the band’s name.
“The style of what we play is folky, and a folk twist on what we’re playing,” Eamon says, adding that you don’t see an electric guitar or a bass guitar in the line-up, but what you do see and hear is a mandolin and harmonica (played by Karl) and a banjo and harmonica (played by Clive).
As to how they arrived at the eighteen songs that make up the setlist of the three gigs, it was all done in harmony and without any discord. When I ask if there was any disagreement, Karl pipes up to say “whatever I say in the end” goes.
That was quickly laughed down.
By Alan Morris’s reckoning from nearly seven years of playing, they have between 80 and 90 songs on their catalogue. Patrick puts the number closer to 100.
“We’ve brought songs in, and we play them, and some stick and some don’t, and for this show, there’s probably half we’ve known for years, and a new facet we’ve brought in,” Alan says.
Eamon reckons there’s probably no one person at the CAT Club gigs who’ll know all eighteen songs. He could be right.
But what you can expect on the night(s) is a session on a stage, Eamon says, and if people want to sing along, they’re more than welcome. At which point the conversation veers into a well-known Irish musician who once stopped a gig because the audience was singing along. As good as that cat is (and he is), for that offense, he wouldn’t cut the mustard with Wildfire.
Pre-Covid
Before Wildfire moved to Patrick’s síbín, they had a practice room in O’Sullivan’s Bar in Douglas (what is it about guitar clubs and pubs?), and every few months, they’d come downstairs and put on a show and bring in a crowd of family and well-wishers.
But with the arrival of the pandemic, the pub option fell by the wayside. They haven’t been able to find a replacement since, and while most people don’t want to sit through a band in practice, Wildfire would love to get out in public to do more “warm-up sessions.”
As Eamon says, they’re not choosy or selective, adding that cafes and coffee shops are also venues they’d be happy to rock up to.
When Covid hit, Wildfire, pretty much like the rest of the world wherever the internet is available, pivoted online.
“We did a huge amount of stuff online, and we put up a lot of individual songs online,” Alan said.
They also did a group version of “I’ll Fly Away,” originally sung by James and Martha Carson, and which has appeared in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” and more recently in the Elvis biopic. The Wildfire version opens with that quintessential Pandemic/Zoom video: a lot of people on screen in their little boxes but breaks into a collage of band members and their families in happier times, clearly waiting to fly away from the Pandemic, or to a time before it.
Incidentally, it’s a song also performed by Whitehorse, Eamon says. “That’s the only song I think that we overlap with them.”
“But they don’t do it very well,” Karl chimes in dryly, a playful jab at the rival band from across town.
“They do,” Eamon says, ever the diplomatic band leader.
What Wildfire didn’t do during the pandemic is play online together. They tried, but the tech isn’t quite up to scratch for an online jam session. A combination of buffer delays and the tech blocking out instruments which it considered as background noise meant that they knocked the idea of meeting and playing online together after one try.
“The Covid couple of years were a disaster,” Eamon says.
For some things, especially music, nothing beats real life. Musicians and music had to adapt during the Covid years, but there’s nothing quite like showing up.
“Wednesday nights are sacred in our calendar,” Alan says. “Nothing goes in on a Wednesday night from September to summer.”
To misquote Tolstoy’s unhappy family quote, all bands are essentially the same: there are the leaders, the jokers, the virtuosos, the workers, and the list goes on. With amateur groups, it’s no different. But what is different, though, is something Patrick hit on, which is likely true of a lot of groups that bring together accountants, teachers, nurses, council workers, students or middle managers, be they chess or handball or book clubs.
“It's a very kind of enabling thing,” Patrick said of the group and their weekly sessions. “I mean, one thing I like about the group is that everybody is very, you know, supportive of everybody else. None of us are going to be the next Eric Clapton or anything like that. We enjoy each other's company.”
And they’ll be banking on plenty of others enjoying their company over three consecutive nights at the CAT Club this week.
Wildfire Guitar Club are: Eamon Dwyer, Alan Morris, Patrick Cotter, Karl O'Flynn, Clive Brooks, Aoife Lucey and Greg McCarthy.
They play the CAT Club this week from Thurs-Sat, May 4-6, 2023. There are a very limited number of tickets available for Three Night Stand. All proceeds will be donated to Pieta House. Tickets much be purchased prior to the gigs and can be done so through the band’s Facebook page here.
