Whipping Boy - the most underrated Irish band of all time?

Whipping Boy, those sweet mangled things...

It was November 1992; I was in the Olympia, listening to the wonderfully unique Thom McGinty - aka The Diceman - MC an AIDS benefit show to celebrate World AIDS Day. I went along as there was a rumour that U2 would make a surprise appearance. I knew that they were in town, winding down on a Christmas break from the bloated phenomenon that was the Zoo TV tour - a technical extravaganza that showcased the band’s new-found ability to embrace kitsch, post-modernism, self-deprecation and package it in the intertextual, urban portable city of Zoo TV. I was excited, but frankly a bit miffed as they hadn’t yet brought this tour to Europe, with the RDS gigs still nearly a year way.

Anyway, they didn’t show up, instead they sat themselves on Pat Kenny’s couch on RTÉ One whilst their doppelgangers (I think they were actually called Doppelganger!), played on the small studio stage beside them in Donnybrook. It was all a bit mad; thankfully my Mam recorded it for me!

U2 didn’t play, in the end, but we got Bono’s other doppelganger - Gavin Friday, who was touring his Adam ‘n Eve album. If memory serves, I also saw Blink and The Pale that night, amongst others. My disappointment at U2’s no-show was diminished when my eyes and ears were opened to a band that would hold an equal share of love and importance in my life for the next 30 years - Whipping Boy (despite that infamous Bono lyric, which would arrive later).

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As I’ve previously mentioned, we all know Whipping Boy by now, mostly for their second album Heartworm, but this was not the case in 1992. Heartworm was still three years away, but before that was the noisy, sonic assault of Submarine, the band’s debut album, and before that was the I Think I Miss You EP, and before that was the Whipping Boy EP, and before that was Sweet Mangled Thing. My mate Warren - singer/songwriter of my first band, and all round musical mentor for this period of my life - was standing beside me in the Olympia that night, and as a dyed-in-the-wool Whipping Boy fan, he made me a recording of all the aforementioned Whipping Boy material that was available. I simply lapped it up.

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I had genuinely never heard anything like Whipping Boy, and as I travelled the length and breadth of the country going to every gig in the subsequent years, I can honestly say that to me, Fearghal, Paul, Myles (Myley) and Colm were superstars. I can remember the anticipation I would feel before the band arrived on stage, the nervous quiver in my stomach, the excitement of hearing them and wondering what kind of madness Fearghal would get up to tonight. Afterwards, Warren would speak to them, I was a bit shy and a bit younger so gave it a miss, but both of us would always grab a set-list from the stage before we left. As a drummer, Colm became a big influence on me, and I distinctly remember that he had the shiniest cymbals I’d ever seen, and they would bounce the light back into the audience whilst his kit sat there, waiting for him to arrive and do his thing. Myley played his bass guitar with this strumming style that I’d never seen in a bass player before. He also bounded around the stage like a guitar hero, whist the real guitar hero Paul always remained pretty motionless, but he oozed charisma. He also had great hair!

And then there was Fearghal!

I was too young, and a little late on the scene to catch Whipping Boy at the legendary Underground on Dame Street. Situated in a basement, I once heard a story of Fearghal running up the stairs from the venue and out through the main door onto Dame Street, mid-set, microphone in hand and singing a song to the great bemusement of strangers walking by whilst the band were playing along down stairs in the venue. I hope it’s true! Fearghal was a front-man in the truest sense, the voice not always great, but the heart, the honesty, the energy and the words were always special.

I may have missed the Underground, but I was there at The Tivoli, The Rock Garden, Féile, The Olympia, and many more.

What I remember most of this period, are two gigs in the Baggot Inn, one week apart (I think). My memory tells me that they were two Monday nights in a row, but I’ll stand corrected. Cillian may have joined them by this stage on guitar. This was post-Submarine, probably 1993 and the band had taken a little time off. On those two nights they played Twinkle, We Don’t Need and Personality - staples of their magnum opus Heartworm that was to follow some years later. I watched these songs grow over the next year or so, safe in the knowledge that they were unrecorded classics and Whipping Boy would one day become a very important band to lots of people. And to be fair, Whipping Boy did become a very important band, but maybe not to as many as we had all wished.

But the band delivered, and left us with Heartworm, a deep, shocking, defiant, dark, funny, brooding, angry, manic, nostalgic, honest (oh how honest this record is) and gorgeous masterpiece. Four men at the absolute top of their game, guided by the production talents of Warren Livesey, who helped find the sublime beauty in the honesty and confrontation of Whipping Boy’s music, aided by the textures of the beautiful string arrangements.

Alas it wasn’t to be for Whipping Boy. The timing was off, the release and promotion campaign for Heartworm was poorly judged by the record company, and the band themselves made some bad professional decisions. They did leave us with the self-released Whipping Boy album in 2000. It gets overlooked, but this is a great record, although not up there with Submarine and Heartworm. You can just smell the sweetness of a band on the way up, and taste the stink in your nostrils when they’re on the way down. It wasn’t the work, as the songs were holding up, but the desperation that hung in the air, as it became obvious that the moment had passed.

But yet, that same old nervous anticipation returned to my stomach when they reformed to play some shows in 2005. I was happy with this development, ecstatic in fact. Happy that I’d get to see them again, hopeful that it might amount to something bigger, but mostly happy for them. Happy for Fearghal, Paul, Myley and Colm. In the 10 years since the release of Heartworm, Whipping Boy’s reputation and popularity grew to levels beyond those of when they were a working band. A peculiar phenomenon, but then again, greatness is usually assured over time, rarely in the moment. In the 12 years since the reformation, it could be argued that their legend has grown further still.

Once again, I found myself in the front row of the Olympia, 13 years later, older, wiser, more cynical now having seen my own music career dreams slowly decline. It was great to see them again, they were pretty rusty but I didn’t care. What I remember most is Fearghal’s leather trousers, his calls for a revolution, and a hilarious situation where Colm could not figure out the four-bar count into the first verse of Fiction following Paul’s guitar intro (anorak territory - the first count is on the last chord). He did the exact same thing in The Savoy in Cork the following night when I travelled down to see them. I missed their performance at Oxegen some months later, but I heard they had it together by then and were outstanding.

I never got to see Whipping Boy again, as the reformation collapsed soon after, for whatever reason. And the less said the better with regards to the Whipping Boy that reformed again in 2010/2011 without Paul and Myley.

Bands have a certain time when they are vital, and our time had passed. -Paul Page.

The secret is in knowing when to stop, and I can only imagine how difficult it is for a band such as Whipping Boy to realise this. The tragedy is not knowing where they could have gone, there was probably so much more. Or maybe they were meant to shine bright, but for a brief period. If this is the case, well, mission accomplished. Whatever about the sadness and regret, we still have Heartworm.

Heartworm by Whipping Boy will be re-released on double LP and double CD on the Needle Mythology label on September 3, 2021, featuring a remaster of the album by Sean Magee at Abbey Road, a second record and CD of B-sides, two previously unreleased demos and live tracks, and sleeve notes by RTÉ's Colm O'Callaghan.

Whipping Boy - the most underrated Irish band of all time?

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Whipping Boy announce details of album re-release

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