Hothouse Flowers

I remember seeing Dublin's Hothouse Flowers at Glastonbury Festival in the pouring rain many moons ago, and as Liam sang the magic words to the classic 'I Can See Clearly Now The Rain Has Gone', the sun broke through the skies to the delight of the gathered masses. Hothouse Flowers have notched up nearly 20 years now and on St. Patricks day we caught up with them after their Oxford Street HMV appearance to promote their latest album 'Into Your Heart'.

Liam Ó Maonlaí – vocals/keyboards
Fiachna O'Braondin – guitar
Peter O'Toole – bass
Dave Clarke - drums


M-N: Happy St Patrick's day lads! Any celebrations planned for tonight?

Liam: Nothing officially planned but I'm going back to Galway [HF are playing in the Black Box Galway tomorrow] I'd like to wake up where I'm gonna be tomorrow!
Peter: We've had a few gigs, Tullamore, Meath, Barcelona, Naas, London

M-N: Tullamore, Naas and then Barcelona, all the best places.

Peter: [Shouts] TULLAMORE-NAAS-BARCELONA, doesn't get much better than that!

M-N: The Album 'Into Your Heart' you recorded with John Reynolds, how did that come about?

Liam: We've known John for 7-8 years, since we recorded a B-side with him, so we had an idea of how he worked and we generally get on well.

M-N: So no arguments then, quite a smooth process.

Peter: John mixed the record and co-produced it, in a sense he brought it to its conclusion and he oversaw that. He brought in Carolyn Dale who he works with to play the Cello on it. We had mixed the album before and done a lot of the production work ourselves. By the time John heard it we thought it was finished but he believed he could really take it forward in terms of sound.

M-N: How much creative freedom do you have?

Peter: Well, what was interesting was that we were in Dublin and he [John Reynolds] was in London so we could be a bit more objective in a way because we weren't going in everyday listening to it. He would send over some mixes and we would listen to them in our own time, then we all went over to London for the last few days.

M-N: It's been 5-6 years since the last album, were these songs written over that time?

Peter: Quite a few of the songs we had been writing and recording over the last 3-4 years. Magic Bracelets, for example, we had written and recorded three years ago.


M-N: The Dublin Gospel choir, how did they get involved.

Fiachna: They had done some recordings in the studio that we were working in and one of the engineers was going on about how good they were. We all love Gospel music anyway so we just got their managers number and rang to see if they would be interested in working with us, and they were. Since then we have being doing loads of stuff with them. In Dublin we had a big launch day and they were there with us for the whole day doing shots and radio etc. Even last night in Naas 9 or 10 of them showed up and they got up and sang, just really out of the good of their hearts and the love of the music.

M-N: Liam, Bono said you're the best white male soul singer in the world, how do you feel about that?

Liam [laughs] I Don't know, I'm still working on my acceptance speech for when I call up to his door some day! No, but it's a nice thing to say, from time to time he's taken me to one side to give me a pep talk about what I have, regarding my voice and the type of person I appear to be and appear to be putting across. But you know there's thousands of soul singers and soul is a term for African American music in a way, but to sing with soul is to sing with soul and there's thousands of white, red, yellow and all kinds of people singing it. [Liam pauses and smiles] I'm just the best white one!! [laughter]

M-N: What are your memories of the appearance in the 1988 Eurovision song contest.

Liam: Fond memories!!
Peter: ‘Jump the gun' were the Irish entry.

M-N: At the start what were the goals you set yourself and have you achieved them?

Peter: We didn't really set any goals, as long as we kept playing and kept enjoying it that was the main goal.
Fiacna: We started off having great fun just playing in the streets and then in the bars afterwards, a good laugh that went on for about a year and a half. We were getting great gigs in U.C.D (University College Dublin) and T.C.D (Trinity College Dublin) and they were bringing us onto bigger stages. It was like we had two bands, the busking bank was called the Incomparable Benzini Brothers and the night time band was called the Hothouse Flowers.

M-N: Where did the Benzini Brothers name come from?

Liam: There's a bus route called the 46A that goes from Dun Laoghaire to town (Dublin), and in Dun Loaghaire there's a shop called the Benzini Brothers and I thought that would be a great name for a band. I needed tickets for the Trinity Ball one time, so I entered the talent contest with Mike Walker and decided to use the name the Benzini Brothers. It got properly used when we went out for our first busk and we called ourselves the Incomparable Benzini Brothers.

M-N: Is that around when you won street entertainer of the year?

Liam: Yeah, that's right.

M-N: And then you signed to “Mother Records”

Liam: Yes we signed to them a few months later.

M-N: What do you think of the music scene in Dublin as it is now compared to when you guys were first around.

Peter: It's gone in several waves in terms of what you read about here all the time, and then there's the constant line of people who are always playing music, Blues, traditional music and all kinds of music. Popular music has gone, rock bands, pop bands, boy bands and girl bands. Now it seems to be bands like “The Frames” who have been around for nearly as long as we have, Paddy Casey and David Kitt people like that who are more singer song writers, less poppy.
Liam: Hard working people too. When we were around all the bands were just looking for deals, that's where the focus was, and I just though; you're missing the point. The people like the Frames and that crowd who were playing on the streets were watching the generation that came before and made their decisions to keep it more at home or keep it more in the heart.

M-N: Do you still have a chance to keep an eye on new things going on?

Liam: Yeah opportunities come, its not like I've got a P.A. who sits there watching telly all day and tells me what's good. I get calls from people like Donal Dineen who from time to time organises gigs and that's where I saw bands like “The Jimmy Cake”, really interesting band, like creativity spilling off them. Really laid back with nothing to prove, just really happy to be doing it, keen to be heard but knowing that the music actually does the work.

M-N: You all seem very relaxed and calm, how important to you is spirituality and faith in music and everything you do as a band.

Liam: I suppose our collective spirituality is just our music. Peter wrote a lot of the lyrics and songs off this last record and I interpret them. In some ways our minds and our creative muses come together and it comes out as the band. We've all got our separate ways of expressing things, occasionally we might sit and have a conversation and it might go somewhere, it might not go somewhere. Spirituality is a very personal thing, thousands or millions of people have being killed because of what someone thinks is the right thing or wrong thing to do.

M-N: “Feel like living” sounds like it's about fatherhood/parenthood and family, what was the inspiration behind it?

Peter: I have two children, the last one I had since the last record and it just changes everything for me. We were taking a break and I had a lot of time to think about things. I moved out to a little village just outside of Dublin and I was really inspired by living there. Also, we're all fathers now as well so that puts us on a new level together as people. I sort of didn't just want to turn it into the cliché that it was just a father and son song. There's so many people starving for that pigeon hole that I didn't want to feed it. That's the beauty of the song, people will interpret it for themselves, when your writing creatively what your saying, I think your in touch with something and it has a different meaning for different people, it just does. You can sing it to anybody about anything really.

M-N: Track 10, “Alright” is a great song, is it going to be a single? I love it, just one of those songs that make you glad to be alive.

Liam: We're kind of open to generally how people feel, I suppose the ones who are going to be carrying it around from shop to shop, T.V to Radio are the ones who need to feel, this is the one. Ideally we have fantastic music and everyone goes “Yes”, and that doesn't always happen, but we wrote them all and we are going to play them all so it doesn't really matter. “The end of the road”, which is going to be the single here, I think, that came from the radio.

M-N: What about festivals this year, we all remember the Glastonbury appearance when you did “I can see clearly now” which is still one of my greatest ever Glastonbury moments.

Peter: We're doing as many as we can
Fiacna: We might be doing Glastonbury again this year, the acoustic tent!

M-N: What sort of music inspired you guys then?

Liam: Tim Buckley, for me as a singer. When I was a teenager and I didn't know what I was going to do I was hanging around with a bunch of friends who were my ex-girlfriends friends. We were at a party and I was stoned and this music came on and it was the funkiest voice I'd ever heard. I was getting into soul music at that time and there was a white quality to the voice that was just exciting, it was like voodoo.
Fiacna: As a kid I lived beside a monastery, and there was this long-haired monk called Stan Coughlan from Sligo. He had a flying V guitar, a little room that was his guitar room and he had candles everywhere that were dripping continuously, and this guy in his brown habit with a Gibson V-guitar! He was into Rory Gallagher and I kind off got friendly with the guy because I was into the guitar, didn't really know how to play it. Him and his friend got me tickets to go and see Rory Gallagher and I was completely blown away. I loved his electric guitar playing, but particularly his mandolin and acoustic playing. I think it took me years to realise it influenced the way I actually play acoustic guitar.

M-N Peter? Can you beat the monk story?

Peter: Well I got my first pair of jeans, denim jean in 1979 and a very shinny pair of white runners. The police were popular at the time and they had denim jeans and white runners, so I went to see them in Leixlip and the runners didn't stay very white for long. I had also just heard “A day without me” and that was really great and then I'd just got into the police, there was something great about their music, something not white about it, its roots were Reggae or SKA, and then I got into that type of music for a while, The Beat, The Specials, Madness, a little bit, although they were a little more poppy. Then I found out that my birthday was on the same day as Jimmy Hendrix, and he blew my mind with his guitar playing. Throughout all of that, from early childhood there was a thread of traditional Irish music all the way through.
Dave: Well, on Christmas day I used to go visit a lot of my family around Dublin. Always on Christmas day I used to go to my Aunts, where the black and white T.V would be on with Nat King Cole, Bing Crosy or Frank Sinatra and I used to perform on the table for my Dad singing all the songs. Then as I got older there was a band across the road that used to do covers of the Beatles songs and Rolling Stones and I used to go over and watch them. The drummer, who sadly died in a car crash, used to lend me Beatles records and he lent me a record player. After that it was always Top of the Pops on a Thursday, and then the 80's came and I remember seeing Echo and the Bunnymen and they were just fantastic.

M-N: Ok thanks a lot guys, Dave just one last thing, looking at you drumming you seem to pull a series of different faces all the time, is this just something that happens!!

Dave: I have a quota of different faces I have to get out in every gig! It just happens, I find it very hard to just sit there. It's an incurable disease!


There is no doubt that Hothouse Flowers will continue to inspire and entertain audiences for a long time to come. Their mix of celtic rhythm, Irish folk and gospel is the tonic we all need in these troubled times.

Their latest album 'Into Your Heart' is available now.