Amy Toolan speaks to Danny O’Reilly from The Coronas ahead of their appearance at Feis Festival in London to find out all the backstage gossip.

So what have the band been up to lately then?

 We’ve sort of taken a bit of time off, our last album was released in September ’09 so it’s been a while, we’ve been on the road for over a year now! We spent the last summer in Dingle in County Kerry, and spent the last month and a half almost just writing and recording demos and stuff gathering material for the next album. We only have a handful of gigs this summer before we start recording in August. We’ve about seven gigs altogether, like one every weekend. We have a festival this weekend in Longford (Ireland), and next weekend the Feis. It’s quite cool really, we have a good few things to keep us going but we’re really looking forward to the Feis.

You will be playing alongside the big names in music such as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison at the Feis, do you feel any pressure as a result?

 It’s amazing, we were asked to do it originally and thought ‘ah yeah this sounds great’, we didn’t quite realise how amazing the line up was until recently! To play with the likes of Christy Moore is just unbelievable; we’re really looking forward to it. We’ve all decided we’re going to stay for the whole weekend and really get in to it.

Who are you must looking forward to seeing perform?

 Well, I’ve never actually seen Christy Moore play live, and I love Christy Moore! So that will be nice to see. But even right down the bill to the likes of Mick Flannery, and others I love. Then there’s The Cranberries. Theirs was the first album I ever bought, and I was mad about them, I’ll never forget that. I remember seeing them live at The Point when I was about thirteen, and that was the last time I seen them, so it will be great to see them again!

And when was the last time The Coronas played in London?

Last summer we played The Hyde Park Festival and Paddy’s Day last year we played Trafalgar Square for the big Paddy’s day celebration there, as well as a few other smaller gigs. We’ve played here a good few times, but would love to be over more often to be honest.

The Coronas are obviously well versed in the art of gigging, but where has been your favourite place to play so far?

We’ve been really lucky. We’ve got to play Australia, Asia and America. But I do really like America. It seems like a place where we should be gigging, and where it could really happen for us. I just really like a lot of the cities in America. I spent a summer in Chicago, a summer in San Diego, and been to New York a couple of times, it’s a great place. It’s different to the UK and Ireland I think because in general the people seem to be a little more receptive to our music. America just seems to give that clean slate, but I guess there will always be places you come across that seem like that, more ‘music sceney’ than others. We did a tour across the US there in February/March and it was just amazing, 17 dates and we drove across from the west coast over to New York. It was just unbelievable, Route 66 on a big bus of twelve smelly men, it was great and we really enjoyed it!

And what can we expect from The Coronas new album?

We’re definitely more excited about this than we have been about any of our other stuff, even already we’re ready to record. It feels a bit different because I play a bit more piano, where as I used to play a lot of guitar, and there’s more synth and stuff. We didn’t really think about it much, we didn’t go in to it thinking ‘let’s write something that will sound like this’ or anything. We don’t consider ourselves unbelievable musicians or anything, we’re just songwriters, and we let the songs just take shape whatever way they sounded best. I’m excited about it, it’s hard to explain!

And will we hear material off the new album at the Feis?

Yeah, we are trying to add in as many as we can. It’s tough though, because people who know us want to hear our old stuff as well. You don’t want to be ‘that band’ that only plays their new stuff, and doesn’t do any of their songs that people want to hear. We’ll see, we will definitely do four or five. A lot of the new stuff went down really well in America, so hopefully the same will happen at the Feis!

For all the new Irish bands starting off in music, who aspire to be in the position The Coronas are in right now, what advice would you give?

It’s crazy because we still consider ourselves a new, young band, and we’re on our third album! On the music scene back home it’s a lot easier for bands to get to playing. We have so many bands coming through like Royseven and The Kanyu Tree, getting really good radio play, which is brilliant. When we started it was so hard to get radio play unless you were a singer songwriter, we just struck lucky with San Diego Song. I’d definitely just say keep working, if you love it keep doing it and be weary that it can be hard work. Be ready, if you get a bit of luck, just to grab your chance when it comes. There isn’t really any big secret (laughs), if there was we would probably be a lot more successful than we are at the moment!

Sourced from : London Feis