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Get caught up in the mischief and malarkey of Shilelagh Law

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Shilelagh Law

Photo by Patrick Oehler

Going backstage to interview Shilelagh Law is not your typical rock stars-meet-interviewer experience. Rather, it is a time warp that puts the uninitiated back into a high school gym locker room.

The class cut-ups size you up quickly, and soon your waistline and hairline are fair game in a relentless onslaught of jokes.

That same good-natured fun personifies the Shilelagh Law live experience. At their Knitting Factory show over the weekend, the band starts and stops on a dime, with each turn punctuated by mile-wide grins and high fives.

It is impossible not to get caught up in the mischief and malarkey of their show, and the crowd on this night could be observed pumping their fists in the air, screaming soccer stadium chants between songs, and shouting out the words to all the bedrock traditional ditties and original tunes in the band’s repertoire.

“It’s not a listening show,” says Denis McCarthy, a five-time All-Ireland fiddle champion. “It’s not a passive experience. If you’re not there to scream along with us, then you have no business being there.”

His brother Kevin is also in the band, and he is a two-time All-Ireland accordion champion. One is a fireman, one is a policeman; one comes to sound check in a Yankees jersey, the other one sports a Mets Jersey. They are polar opposites who taunt one another mercilessly with good natured, God-given wit.

Terence Brennan (percussion by night, high school teacher by day), Stephen Gardner (firefighter and bass player), and Richard Popovic (guitar, vocals, and carpenter) wear their working class roots on their sleeves and in their songs.

Meaty, workingman hands fly up the fret boards and across the buttons of the accordions as they play and sing songs about their neighborhood.

The band has added a crop of new original tunes to their lineup with “1 and 9,” their fantastic new CD. For the band, this typifies a coming of age that finds the band branching out beyond their Irish cover tune set.

“It's a world of troubles, I've sure had some/I don't know where I'm going but I know where I'm from/ I'm from New York Town, the very best part/With the guts and the grit and the love and the heart,” sings Popovic on the title track, and it sums up the Shilelagh Law experience perfectly.

“We are all middle class people, and I think the appeal of this band is that we play what we know,” reasons Gardner.

“We play the song ‘1 and 9’ that Rich wrote. There are people in the audience that know all about the experience of hanging around 242nd Street under the train. A lot of Irish fans we have settled in Inwood, Washington Heights, and around Manhattan College in the seventies and eighties.

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