It’s a clear, crisp Tuesday night in London, and the street outside the Scala venue near King’s Cross station is eerily quiet. Inside, however, is another matter. It’s squeezing-past-room only as Irish accents chatter loudly, drinks are spilled, arms are held aloft and groups of friends push closer to the stage to hear the music of their compatriots. It’s not quite a sean-nós session in the corner of a Kilburn pub, but for a generation of Irish expats in their mid-to-late 20s, The Coronas are the sound of home.
"We're locals now too – we live down the road," frontman Danny O'Reilly informs the sold-out crowd with a grin, before breaking into an Irish language version of their song Heroes or Ghosts. If you've never been in a foreign country with hundreds of voices singing a song as Gaeilge that's not Amhrán na bhFiann, it's quite an experience.
A week later, O’Reilly and his bandmate Dave McPhillips are back in Dublin, huddled in a meeting room at Universal Ireland HQ. In the label’s reception area, there are large posters of Hozier and Delorentos, but none of the Coronas.
"We're refusing to do any more interviews until they put one of us up," O'Reilly jokes, but there's a lot to talk about. For starters, it's not just their country of residence that has changed. Earlier this year, the foursome signed a four-album deal with Island Records on the basis of their fourth album, The Long Way. It's their first venture into major label territory, having released their first three on 3ú, an independent label run by O'Reilly's father, Joe.
“We always had the idea that we had our little label here and if we made a good enough album, someone would come along and pluck us up,” says O’Reilly. “But we sort of realised that you’ve gotta go put yourself in the shop window.”
The frontman moved to London several years ago to be with his then girlfriend Laura Whitmore, but it didn't take much encouragement for his bandmates to follow. The four live in the same house in Islington, along with bassist Graham Knox's girlfriend.
"Our reality TV show would be really crap, a really unfunny version of The Monkees," laughs O'Reilly. "The bigger you get in a small country like Ireland, the less shows you do. When we were doing our first couple of albums, we'd be gigging four nights a week.
“Then it sort of got to the stage where we were just waiting around for our big Christmas gigs and the singles were still doing well, so we needed a change for our own mindset. Going over there, putting ourselves in a rehearsal room, starting all over again and trying to build it up.
Major interest
“As soon as we moved over, we signed a publishing deal with Big Life and there was interest from majors; things just started to happen,” O’Reilly says. “Creatively we were putting ourselves at the bottom of a much bigger ladder but we needed that.”
The album is a reinvention of the Coronas in many ways. In their early days they were spurned by musos and dismissed as faddish college rock – an image that was reinforced by hits such as San Diego Song ("We sleep all day and we drink all night / We are not wasting our time") – and O'Reilly was dogged by constant references to his mother, Mary Black. Now, at the tender age of 29, they tend to take things a little more seriously.
Love, loss, regret
"There's a certain naivety about our first album that I think is sort of charming now," says O'Reilly. "I wouldn't be able to write a song like San Diego Song now . . . No one was telling me it was crap till we got out and played it."
A big theme in The Long Way is that of love, loss and regret – presumably inspired by O'Reilly's break-up with the aforementioned Whitmore.
"Closer to You didn't have one break-up song on it – it was a more positive time from a personal relationship point of view, I suppose, and this one came off the back of a break-up, hence the reason there's some break-up songs on there," he says. "I'm not ashamed of it: it was a big thing in my life and it felt like therapy to write about it."
There is a sense that with the backing of a new label, a strong set of songs and a newfound confidence, the Coronas may be on a roll 11 years after forming. Still, it must sting – even a little – seeing similar acts such as Kodaline getting US TV slots off the back of one album, when the Terenure band have slogged it out over the last decade.
“To be honest, I think it has stood to us actually,” says O’Reilly. “We’re happy with the way we’ve done things. We do look at bands like Kodaline – who I think are great, by the way – and even Hozier, and we are envious, but it sort of spurs you on because you think, ‘It can be done’.”
Are they wary of continuing to play to rooms full of Irish people wherever they go?
“I wouldn’t say wary is the right word; we’re aware of it,” says Dave McPhillips, shrugging. “We were lucky to play to such a big crowd in London last week without a proper album release. At the same time, if, at the end of this album cycle, we played the same gig to the same room and it was very obviously the same percentage of Irish people, you’d kind of think that it was a missed opportunity.”
Ambition
“We still have ambition, but it’s more to prove it to ourselves than to anyone in particular,” says O’Reilly.
“We’re more confident as musicians and as people, and we know we’ve made a good album here. You’re always stepping into the unknown, you never know which way it’s going to go, so if you can be happy with yourself and be proud of it, that’s what matters.”
