Tradfest 2026: Hothouse Flowers
National Stadium, Dublin
★★★★☆
It starts with the gentlest of touches. Piano notes move towards the melody as bouzouki and guitar add accents over a gentle cymbal wash. It’s as if we’ve walked in on musicians already lost in creating what became the secret Masses, in penal-law times, of An Raibh Tú ar an gCarrig? before one tradition blends with another as Liam Ó Maonlaí’s keyboard and Martin Brunsden’s double bass walk hand in hand through Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.
Without pause we’re into Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now; when the prayed-for rainbow breaks through, the guesting Discovery Gospel Choir carries the song to the rafters. Ó Maonlaí throws his crumpled jacket to the floor to crumple some more, calls for a singalong, and we are off.
Hothouse Flowers were pop stars for a while. Now they’re something far more precious, a band with real soul playing off each other with magical telepathy. It’s there in the gossamer-delicate falsetto of An Emotional Time, from their superb and criminally undervalued album Songs from the Rain, from 1993, and in the deep groove of the same record’s Isn’t It Amazing. They find the right note to open up the heart’s doors, calling on us to fill the air and make that joyous sound.
And it’s there most of all with It’ll Be Easier in the Morning, which has, freed from the of-its-time production of People, Hothouse Flowers’ debut album, from 1988, become the stirring revival meeting gospel song it was supposed to be.
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Susan O’Neill jokes that she’ll inject a bit of misery, but, as Ó Maonlaí points out, there’s nothing miserable about her guest spot. Now You See It, Trouble and, especially, John Prine’s Some Humans Ain’t Human wins over anyone who, like me, has not previously paid her enough attention.
The Stunning man Steve Wall shines just as brightly with Interference/Fergus O’Farrell’s Prayer Before a Voyage and Sonny Condell’s marvellous Down in the City.
The National Stadium’s capacity crowd has been waiting for an excuse to take to the aisles, and the infectious west African Highlife-tinged celebration that the band’s big hit Don’t Go has morphed into provides it.
After the choir blows the sirocco into our faces, each band member takes a solo, with Dave Clarke transmogrifying into Elvin Jones behind the kit and Peter O’Toole coaxing a Roger McGuinn blast of psychedelia from nowhere.
Wall returns for a rocking Brewing Up a Storm, with Fiachna Ó Braonáin in particular grinning like a Friday night, before Tom Dunne is called from the wings – Something Happens provided sterling support earlier – for the closing Sí Do Mhamó Í.
Dunne gamely joins in for the chorus despite perhaps possessing fewer focail than others present. Wall, meanwhile, comes close to going full Scór na nÓg at the back, such is the power of the music – which goes up another gear altogether when Ó Braonáin brings out the tin whistle and Ó Maonlaí picks up the bodhrán.
Some people don’t rate Hothouse Flowers. They’re wrong.
