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who's eddie
'We've played 8,000 gigs': Rockin' the suburbs with the hardest working band in Irish showbiz
Introducing Rockin’ the Suburbs, a new series on gigs and cultural experiences that you rarely see covered by Irish media.
In this brand-new series, journalist and spoken word artist Cormac Fitzgerald travels to a different town or suburb each week to cover the gigs and cultural experiences you rarely see covered by Irish media outlets.
This week’s subject: Irish showbiz veterans turned ‘ultimate cover band’ Who’s Eddie.
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I ARRIVE AT the Green Isle Hotel in Newlands Cross, just off the N7 on the outskirts of Dublin, after 8pm on a dull Friday evening.
A scattering of people sit around the hotel bar and restaurant, nursing drinks or finishing dinner. On a projector screen, a football match is just getting under way. To the left of the screen, the members of Who’s Eddie are setting up for their show.
Now billing themselves as the “ultimate cover band”, the Dundalk family act reckon they must have played about 8,000 gigs together over a career spanning five decades.
In that time, they’ve appeared on the Late Late Show, scored a top ten Irish hit, co-written Eurovision songs and opened for the likes of Joe Dolan and even Celine Dion.
For many years Who’s Eddie felt they were on the cusp of stardom, but their big break never came. They never “made it”. Despite this, they are still gigging away in hotels, bars and venues every week.
I am here to find out what keeps them going, and to hear about all the highs and lows of their long and fascinating career.
Friday at the Green Isle
They greet me warmly, joking and laughing together as they set up the space, putting all their own equipment – including speakers, full lights and a sound desk – together with the ease of people who have performed these tasks thousands of times before.
After set up, the five of us sit at an empty table and Who’s Eddie tell me the story of their lives and their music careers, which are completely intertwined.
The band is made up of the three Molloy sisters (Jacqui, Orla, and Dara) and their brother, Keith. The sisters do all the singing, dancing and crowd work, while Keith provides the music and mixing on his laptop.
A quick look at Who’s Eddie’s schedule shows me just how busy they are: tomorrow, the band will play The Pennyhill in Lucan, on Sunday it will be their monthly gig at the Noggin Inn in Sallynoggin. Last week, it was the Old Mill in Tallaght and Gleeson’s in Drogheda. The previous week, two other venues.
On St Patrick’s weekend, they played six shows in five days. Over the Christmas period, they played 18 gigs, including eight sold out nights in the Castleknock Hotel, a regular residency for the band since 2013.
In between all of this, they also perform at different functions, with about seven weddings a month to do over the summer.
“For next year, we’re already booked for all the bank holiday Sundays. Most of the weekends and all of the Mother’s days, Paddy’s days … things like that, they’re already booked,” Jacqui tells me.
“You hear some bands say, ‘oh, we’re doing a tour’ and they do six days. What? That’s a weekend.”
Early beginnings
Who’s Eddie have been doing this for a very long time. If you were tuned into the Irish music scene during the 1990s you might remember them from their energetic dance-pop single Take Me Up, or their fast-paced club remix of Donna Summers’ Hot Stuff, or from the countless gigs they performed in music venues in Dublin City and across the country.
But by that point, aged in their 20s and 30s, the band members of Who’s Eddie already had a whole lifetime’s worth of touring and gigging behind them. Now all in their 60s, the siblings have been playing professionally together for 44 years, since 1982. But they performed as a family for the first time in 1969, playing a local gig with their father.
From there, talent shows, TV appearances, and international tours all followed. In January 1983, with Jacqui and Keith just finished school, Orla soon to do her Leaving Cert, and Dara still in her mid-teens, the Molloy parents sold their family home, took the kids out of school, and with their father as their manager the entire clan jetted off to Europe in pursuit of fame and fortune.
From Dundalk to the world
The Molloys spent the 1980s in a whirlwind of tours and travelling around the world. They recorded and gigged constantly so they could “make it”.
Orla recently self-published a memoir, Are We There Yet?, detailing the family’s journey and the various highs and lows of show business.
At the forefront of their mind at all times was the possibility – the inevitability, they might have called it – of great success, of securing a record contract and becoming famous.
But for one reason or another the 1980s breakthrough didn’t happen. The family eventually returned to Ireland at the beginning of the 1990s, worn out and dejected.
“We did come back disillusioned,” says Jacqui. “Ten years trying, and we thought we’re not going to make it now.”
Bringing it back home
The family had a big, energetic, Europop and dance sound that was out of place in the showband and rock-focussed Ireland of the 1980s, which is one of the reasons they had to travel to find success. But the Ireland they returned to in the early 1990s was very different from the country they had left.
Orla says the group “exploded onto the gig scene” when they moved back, and they were booked solid for months.
The band started to get advice from Louis Walsh, at the time the manager of an up-and-coming band called Boyzone.
They got a record deal and released the original club banger Take Me Up in 1996. They gigged constantly, and wrote songs and provided backing vocal for others, but for one reason or another, the kind of major success the Molloys had been chasing all their lives still eluded them.
Slowly, things faded away. The band were also worn out. They had spent much of their childhoods, and all of their adult lives to that point, fixated on “making it”, and exhaustion was setting in.
They wanted to settle down into real relationships and a normal sort of life. In the late-2000s the recession hit Ireland, and a lot of the corporate work the band were doing disappeared, but they scaled back and kept going.
Says Keith: “When you were in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you did one thing: you learnt to play an instrument, then you played an instrument, and hopefully you’d make it. They were the only three steps.
I think we gigged a lot always with that in mind. And in the early 2000s, we started just gigging then, which we were doing anyway. We just sorted of cruised, and switched off the desperation of trying to make it.
From then to now
Chatting to Who’s Eddie, it is clear that after all the years they remain very close as a family.
They tell me stories of life on the road. Of the good nights, like the Christmas concerts, when they have a bigger band and play to 500 enthusiastic party goers a night; and of the bad nights, where a hotel manager will tell them to get changed in the car, or where they have to chase promoters for the money.
But the band don’t seem bitter or jaded. There is still a sparkle about them and they are great company. An hour quickly passes by, and soon they have to get ready to go on stage.
The Molloys talk about retirement (a very hard thing to do as a gigging musician), but it’s say it’s hard to imagine not performing. It is the only life they know. And there is always the possibility of new music. There is always the dream.
“But we’re realistic, too,” says Keith.
“If you look at it now, we’ve definitely made a career out of music, which a lot of people our age haven’t managed to do,” says Orla.
Our success has been that we made a living out of this and we’ve managed to do it for 40+ years, do you know what I mean?
Setting the place alight
The football match (Hull vs Millwall, a nil-all draw) is just finishing up as the projector screen disappears into the ceiling and Who’s Eddie take to the stage.
Keith has the music pumping, heavy on the bass, and the lights are flashing as the three women emerge in sparkling sequined tops, dazzling the crowd.
There are no introductions or lead-ins or warning. One minute, its a dull evening, mumbled conversation, half-empty pint glasses, the next Who’s Eddie are going full throttle.
The injection of energy – between the lighting, the music and the performances – is immediate. They launch right into Cheap Thrills by Sia and a Miley Cyrus number, before giving the crowd Waterloo by Abba.
Over the 70 or so minutes that I am there, Who’s Eddie perform about 20 songs, only stopping to say a quick few words or to down a glass of Hennessy or two. Contemporary hits are played alongside classics like Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You, You’re Such A Good Looking Woman, and September.
They’re really good.
Dara mostly takes the lead, but the women share vocals and the centre spot between them. The vocals seem pitch perfect – Dara hits every note in Tina Turner’s Simply the Best.
The crowd – mostly indifferent at first – get more and more into the show. A young drunk man can’t take his eyes of Jacquie. A couple are dancing at the bar. Everyone is mouthing along. An old friend comes up, hugs Orla, and delivers three glasses of Hennessy for the band.
All the while the music is pumping, the lights are flashing, and the women’s sequins are glowing bright.
By the time I am getting ready to leave, the band are in full swing and everyone is having a great time, including the Molloys themselves.
While I am sure they have good days and bad days, I get the sense that they never get sick of performing.
Whether it is for 50 people in a quiet hotel bar, or 500 people, or 5,000 people they would deliver their songs with the same professional gusto, fun and skill. And in a nondescript hotel off the N7, on a dull Friday evening, for what might be gig number 8,001, Who’s Eddie set the place alight.
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