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E-mailDepressed and Quite Happy!
Pete Depressed is anything but. The lead singer of the Gobshites is a jolly looking, frantic soul in search of a good time, and the good times always seem to follow this Boston band. Fans of their acoustic punk mix are rabid.
A busload of them braved hellacious weather to make it down to the CelticLounge Christmas party last month at Connolly's, where I first encountered them.
Not since Johnny Cash or the Violent Femmes has a musical outfit been able to stir up such menace using nothing more than an acoustic guitar. Their set is loud, ragged, and packed with drinking anthems, which is just the way the crowd liked it.
Apart from original tunes like "Can't Drink Here," "Alcohol," "It's Friday" and the classic "I Only Drink Stout," they did sloppy, irreverent covers of the Pogues' "Streams of Whiskey" (a sloppy, irreverent song to begin with) and the Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues."
Pete is a fascinating character, with many industry stories from his time as a music industry insider. He "worked" Black 47 albums up in Boston for EMI in the early nineties and routinely pulls groups together to make compilation CDs that showcase folk, rock, and punk.
Here's how our talk went:
How would you describe the Gobshites to someone who has never heard the band?
Picture Johnny Ramone joining the Pogues but playing acoustic guitar in the same style that he played his mosrite guitar. That's the Gobshites in a nutshell for you.
I wanted the same wall of sound but with all acoustic instruments. So instead of one guitar and a wall of Marshall amps, we do it with accordion, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, guitar, tin whistle, bass and drums.
You might think of us like the Pogues, backwards. They would take Irish songs and punk them up. We often take old punk songs like "Six Pack" by Black Flag and turn it into an Irish sing-a-long!
It doesn't appear on the surface that those elements would mix, but they do!
I think punk, rock, and folk music are pretty much the same thing with a similar attitude. I have a series of shows I put together in Boston called "pUnKs aRe FoLkS tOo!," where punk singers play acoustic and in the round.
So we just keep blurring the lines. Someday, folks will be singing the Ramones' "Somebody Put Something in My Drink" and think it might have been an old Dubliners number.
What are your influences?
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