When Jeremy Clarkson’s Grand Tour invited Hothouse Flowers to perform on the show’s first episode, in 2016, Liam Ó Maonlaí was inclined to refuse – though not out of any particular animosity towards the boorish television presenter.
“I don’t know him, and that really wasn’t a part of my thinking,” the band’s frontman says down a scratchy phone line from Glasgow, where he has been playing at the Celtic Connections festival. “My thinking was literally there’s so many cars on the road. We have two feet. Obesity is an epidemic in many parts of the world because of the car industry.”
Still, the offer was tempting. The plan was to have Hothouse Flowers reprise their version of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now, which was a hit in the UK in 1990, in the Mojave Desert as Clarkson and his fellow former Top Gear presenters zoomed across the landscape accompanied by a Mad Max-style flotilla of automobiles and fighter jets.
The idea, as explained to Ó Maonlaí, was that, much as The Grand Tour followed on from Top Gear, Hothouse Flowers’s take on I Can See Clearly Now was an improvement on a classic.
“I was kind of going, ‘Do we really want to put our names to that?’” Ó Maonlaí says. “But I thought about it, and the guys wanted to do it. My son said, ‘Dad, just do it.’ And it was great. It’s great. The Mojave Desert is stunning.”
The scene, as it ended up on screen in the Prime Video series, was indeed breathtaking – as Amazon would have hoped, having signed off on the £2.3 million budget. (It’s reportedly the most expensive set piece ever made for television.) But it’s Hothouse Flowers who make it work, bringing a sincerity to a petrolhead orgy of chrome and revving engines.
That same heartfelt quality has been ever present across a career that has seen this “Gaelic soul” group (as their US label called them) surfing the often treacherous waters of the music industry while always striving to stay true to the themselves.
It is a journey that reaches its 40th year in 2025, and while neither Ó Maonlaí nor Fiachna Ó Braonáin, the band’s guitarist, are big on anniversaries, they are nonetheless proud to have made it so far. They’re celebrating with a tour this month and next that will focus on their first two albums, People, from 1988, and Home, from 1990.
“I don’t think we’re banging a drum loudly. It’s just one of those things. You look at the clock and you go, wow, 40 years,” Ó Braonáin says. “That’s wonderful. It doesn’t feel like it. Time stands still and time flies all at once.”
Ó Braonáin is chatty and expansive – talents that have served him well in a recent radio career that included almost 15 years presenting Late Date, on RTÉ Radio 1.
It is amazing how Irish music, and in particular Irish traditional music and Irish folk music, has taken on a new confidence, a new sense of pride
He and Ó Maonlaí have been friends since childhood, when they attended Coláiste Eoin, the pioneering Gaelscoil in south Co Dublin, together. (As a teenager the vocalist was briefly in a band with Kevin Shields, later of the shoegaze icons My Bloody Valentine).
But they are also a study in contrasts. The lead singer is a shaggy, shamanic figure who could talk all day about the primal power of music. Ó Braonáin will meanwhile hold forth on the difficulty of securing Taylor Swift tickets for his daughter. They’re chalk and cheese, night and day, bodhrán and banter.
There are certain subjects where they are in complete lockstep, however, particularly Gaza. In late January Ó Maonlaí took part in a march in Dublin by the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, at which he performed Cearbhall Óg Ó Dálaigh’s 17th-century sean-nós song Eileanóir a Rún. Ó Braonáin has criticised Bono for accepting a US Presidential Medal of Freedom from Joe Biden amid ongoing violence in Palestine. Like many others he wondered why Bono didn’t use his platform to talk about the Middle East.
Ó Braonáin spoke out against the U2 frontman after another singer, Steve Wall of The Stunning, said he’d been “sickened to the core” by photographs of Bono receiving the accolade at the White House. On social media Ó Braonáin agreed, saying he was “Absolutely sickened by this too ... horrendous deliberate blindness to horror”.
“I was quite surprised and disappointed by that,” Ó Braonáin says of Bono. “I don’t think Sinéad [O’Connor] would have done it. I don’t think John Lennon would have done it. I think there was an opportunity to make a much bolder statement.”
He is keen not to be regarded as engaging in the great Irish pastime of Bono-bashing. He and the U2 singer have always been friendly. U2 have brought a lot of positives to Ireland, he says.
“I think he’s a great guy. He’s done some remarkable things with his life. He’s made some extraordinary music. He’s put Ireland on a world stage like very few other people have done as an artist. He has done incredible work for the various foundations that he runs in terms of Aids medication in Africa and all of that.
“But I wonder, in all of that knocking on the door of the White House, and getting millions and millions of dollars from America, has [he] become beholden to that in some sort of way? I don’t know. But I was surprised and disappointed by the silence from the beginning. He’s not the only one. Lots of artists have been very quiet.”
Ó Maonlaí takes a similar view, although he doesn’t criticise Bono by name. “I don’t like people being bombed. That’s all I can say. That comes from ancestral experience. Unfairness is unfairness. That’s all I can say about that – the rest is gossip. ‘He did this.’ ‘He didn’t do that.‘ ’She did this.‘ ’She didn’t do that.’
“It’s overwhelming if we actually do stop and think. All our money is invested in the war machine. That’s why all these governments are saying nothing. Europe is invested in the war machine. Europe is invested in slavery still – there’s no two ways about that.”
Hothouse Flowers and U2 have history. Bono was an early cheerleader for their fellow Dubliners, whose first single, Love Don’t Work This Way, was released on U2’s Mother Records in 1986. The following year U2 invited Hothouse Flowers to open for them at Croke Park. Ó Braonáin takes no pleasure in criticising Bono.
“I’ve been in his company on many occasions. Liam and I have played a few tunes at his house. I think the last time was Easter Sunday about six years ago. He was having a dinner for various people, and he asked would we come and just sing a few tunes. He wanted the traditional kind of music. So we did that and had a very nice day. Jim Sheridan was there, and George Clooney and his wife were there.”
The 1987 Croke Park gig had come as Hothouse Flowers were putting the final touches to People, their debut album, which went on to top the charts in Ireland and reached number two in the UK. They built on that success with Home, which went to number one in Australia.
But they hit the buffers slightly with Songs from the Rain, their 1993 album. Arriving at the height of grunge, and amid the first stirrings of Britpop, it was the wrong album at the wrong time – and they shortly afterwards concluded it was time for a break. They have dipped in and out of Hothouse Flowers ever since while pursuing successful solo projects.
There have been some difficult moments, however. When Ó Maonlaí and Ó Braonáin decided to revive the project in the late 1990s, they felt it was best to do so as a slimmed-down three-piece – as had been the original incarnation of the band, when they had busked in Dublin and then became fixtures at the Magic Carpet pub, in Cornelscourt in south Dublin.
Which meant there was no room for Leo Barnes, their saxophonist. He did not take the news well. He and Ó Braonáin had not spoken for years when Barnes died, in 2022.
“The last time I saw Leo was in the mid-1990s, not long after we had called a halt – for about a year. And one year turned into the guts of two years. We decided that when we came back together it would just be myself, Liam and Peter [O’Toole, their guitarist].
“We left Leo and Jerry [Feehily, the band’s drummer] go. We met up and told them that we couldn’t go on as we were for various reasons. So that was the last time.
“I ran into him around town once or twice. And he wasn’t happy. I remember a friend of mine called and said, ‘Oh, Leo is in the same pub’. And I said, ‘Stick him on’. He didn’t want to talk.”
They would never reconcile. “I hadn’t been in touch with him for about 30 years. From his perspective, I don’t think he was happy with how it ended. I don’t know. He probably knew the writing was on the wall anyway. We all needed to go away and look after ourselves. That’s what needed to happen ... But Leo, may he rest in peace, was an incredible musician.”
For all their popularity in the 1980s, Hothouse Flowers did make for a tempting punchbag. Ó Maonlaí had a barefoot-Jesus thing going on, while their passion for Irish folk and the Irish language was sometimes met with derision, particularly in a Dublin that was working through its postcolonial cultural cringe.
Today all has changed: look at the acclaim heaped on the trad group Lankum and on Kneecap, whose Irish-language rap is universally praised.
“It is amazing how Irish music, and in particular Irish traditional music and Irish folk music, has taken on a new confidence,” Ó Braonáin says. “A new sense of pride. We grew up the 1980s, when the shadows of the Irish language being battered into schoolchildren was still very much present. And Irish traditional music was, weirdly, associated with that as well. All part of that same culture, our culture, that we had become sort of ashamed of.”
One of the reasons Hothouse Flowers have survived for 40 years is that they have opted to do things their own way. Although their first three albums were successful to varying degrees, the idea of spending the rest of their lives on a treadmill of recording and touring didn’t appeal.
So they reimagined the band as something they could set to one side and return to whenever the mood took. Not staking their future on it removes any pressure. Today Hothouse Flowers thrive as an occasional treat for musician and audience alike.
“The way we’ve sort of operated in the last 20 years, if not more, has been kind of flying by the seat of our pants, a bit like we did in the very beginning,” Ó Braonáin says.
“It’s back to the spirit of busking and improvisation and making up things as you go along. And that informs how we do everything, not just on stage but off as well. There’s never any great strategy. The phone rings and people suggest things ...
“People suggested a documentary recently, which I think then people saw and enjoyed a lot,” he says about Hothouse Flowers: Stick Around and Laugh a While, from 2024. “And then somebody approached us about doing a tour. You should do some shows. And we said, ‘That sounds great. Let’s do it.‘”
Hothouse Flowers play the Hub, Kilkenny, on Saturday, February 15th; Leisureland, Galway, on Saturday, February 22nd; Cork Opera House on Friday, March 14th; and National Opera House, Wexford, on Saturday, March 15th
