Karl Kumli: We have the good fortune to be joined this evening by none other than Keith Roberts, one of the founders of The Young Dubliners, and they are coming to Colorado, folks. We’ll tell you more about that in a little bit. Keith, good evening to you.
Keith Roberts: How are you doing?
Karl Kumli: It’s great to have you here on the show. Thank you so much.
Keith Roberts: Thanks for having me. It’s great to know there still is radio out there. It’s very refreshing.
Karl Kumli: Good. Thank you. You are playing tomorrow night at the Snowmass concert series, as I recall. And then you’re going to be in Denver on Saturday night at the Marquis Theatre in Denver. Tell us a little bit about this tour.
Keith Roberts: In one way it’s a little bit of a make-up run and in the other ways it’s just a great way to spend summer, doing these open air shows. So we’re doing the one in Aspen, Snowmass, which has been on the books for ages, but we had a cancellation in March when the Soiled Dove unfortunately closed down. That was our Denver play for St. Paddy’s Day. It was not Paddy’s Day, but it was the weekend beforehand. So we promised we would come back and do a theater show and this is it on Saturday night. It’s our sort of makeup gig for Denver. Everybody has to pretend it’s not a hundred degrees and it’s March and you’re freezing and wear all your winter woolies.
Karl Kumli: Very good. And I understand that you’ve got a new album coming out.
Keith Roberts: Yeah, we’re in the middle of it. It’s been one of those things where as a working band, it’s a little bit different than the way the superstars do it, where they take a year off. So we have to tour and then go in and record. We’ve had it written for over a year and a half, but we’ve recorded almost two thirds now, and we’re going in again in August. We’re going to try to do another big chunk of it and hopefully have it out by March of next year, but we’re playing some of the stuff live now. We’re going to release a single I believe in October, just as a little teaser for the album, so we’re getting there. But it’s a work in progress still as we tour. For the majority of the year, we’re actually on the road. So it makes it a little bit more difficult, but not complaining. As my mother would say, when am I going to get a real job? It’s still a job. You can’t really knock the lifestyle we’ve been given thanks to the support we’ve received and been able to do what we love to do for a living all these years. Quite an amazing thing for us.
Karl Kumli: You’re in, I think, your fourth decade now. Something like that.
Keith Roberts: I know, and that’s frightening. It’s funny. People have asked us that, and a lot of bands celebrate big anniversaries. All we know for sure is that the first album came out in ‘93, our EP. Before that we’d just gone from a duo to a five piece to a seven piece back to a six piece and then ended up as a five piece. We’re not quite sure which date would be considered the beginning because it was St. Patrick’s Day in Los Angeles and let’s just say there was a lot of alcohol taken and nobody can quite remember exactly what year it was. But we’ve been on the road solid, I’d say, for about 30 years now, we’ve been touring, and this’ll be the 10th album. We don’t believe in really cranking out the albums. I look at these records as all I’m leaving to my kid – the legacy of the band. I always judge things by what I think he’ll be able to say about them 20 years from now, so I really tried to put an effort into writing these and making sure that they’re representative of where we were and what was going on in the world at the time. Not all heavy, but the good, the bad and the ugly kind of thing. And so we take our time with the writing. The recording is actually easier. It’s just coordinating the time with our producer and our touring schedule that really causes the delays for the most part.
Karl Kumli: You made a self-effacing comment about supergroups doing the recording thing a little bit differently than you do, but you’ve been rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty of music for a long time. I remember you toured extensively with Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull. I think Bernie Taupin dedicated a song to you all or wrote a song for you. What’s the story there?
Keith Roberts: We wrote a song together. He had become a fan of the band, Seamus at the House of Blues in L.A. And our producer at the time knew him and said, would you like to meet the band? So he came backstage and we were blown away. We couldn’t believe he was there. And then all of a sudden he said he’d like to write with me and he sent me a load of lyrics. Same way he does with Elton, apparently. I looked through them and I found the one I liked and it was called “Red”. He had the words written, so I wrote the music to it, and then it came out so good, and it’s definitely an unusual track.
His lyrics are extremely unusual, to say the least. All of Elton’s stuff over the years, he definitely writes from all styles and topics and all the rest of it. So I tried to do it justice, but then we ended up calling the album “Red” as a kind of a salute to the fact that he’d done that. What most people don’t know is almost right before it came out, Elton got in a little bit of a hissy fit apparently, saying that he had already started work on those lyrics. Bernie told him to stop being a brat and let The Young Dubliners have it. I feel like I nicked a song off of that.
Karl Kumli: That’s a story for your progeny right there.
Keith Roberts: True enough. Sometimes I forget a lot of these things. I remember we were in Italy with Jethro Tull, and Ian just took a big shine to us, was so generous to us. Every tour he takes us all out to dinner. We were having dinner with Doane Perry, the drummer. And they’re just talking very openly to the point where you’re sitting there thinking, if I was a Rolling Stone reporter, this would be unbelievable what I’m hearing. Obviously the respect for each other keeps it quiet, but they were telling stories about opening for Zeppelin that were just mind blowing.
So it has been an amazing run. We played with great bands like Collective Soul and Johnny Lang and our own Uprooted tour where it was us and Great Big Sea and Seven Nations there. There’s been so many amazing things throughout the years. We’ve always been lucky that way. Sometimes I’ll just think about some musicians, bands, songs that I love and it seems like I almost wish that we end up gigging with them or doing a festival with them. So I’ve met a lot of my heroes that way.
Karl Kumli: I’ve seen you two or maybe three times over the years, but I am truly heartbroken that I did not see the Uprooted tour because all three of those bands, Great Big Sea and Seven Nations, have left such a flaming arc across the Celtic music world over the last 25 or 30 years.
Keith Roberts: Thank you. It was an amazing tour. It was one of those things where you have the idea, but you don’t know if you can pull it off. It had a couple of stops and starts and logistical issues, but once we hit it, I think all the bands would admit that it was probably one of the most rewarding experiences, being with your peers. The gigs were almost an inconvenience. We’d get the gigs out of the way and then we’d park our buses in a big triangle and we’d all have theme nights on our bus. Tonight we’re Mexican and the Great Big Sea bus is going to be some sort of classic rock or something, and we would just move around. We jumped from one place to another, just had a blast. It really was a tremendous tour.
Karl Kumli: And what you said earlier about sitting with the men from Tull and hearing the stories, it is a great truism that the very best stories are the ones that for a variety of reasons, you cannot tell.
Keith Roberts: Exactly. I always say, if I write a book, I’m going to say names have been changed. So the innocent get in trouble as well. Every now and again, you do that thing where you start a story and then your brain reminds you, oh no, you can’t tell that one. And you go, “So then we just left.” And you just move on past it.
Karl Kumli: Our guest is Keith Roberts, founder of The Young Dubliners. I want to take you back to the very beginning and how you decided upon the name, The Young Dubliners, and then to ask you about the band’s relationship with Ronnie Drew and The Dubliners themselves. I’m sure there are some good stories there.
Keith Roberts: It’s interesting because obviously, I always tell people if you call your band The Young Dubliners, you mustn’t have much confidence in your longevity. Unfortunately, I was completely wrong. It was actually an interesting story, because we started as a duo just playing ballads, and we were both from Dublin, me and Paul O’Toole. And everybody called us the lads from Dublin, or the young guys from Dublin, because L.A. had never really had anybody do what we were doing. New York, the East coast, was where all the Irish bands were. We started getting this name, The Young Dubs, The Young Dubliners.
I grew up with the Dubliners because my mom and dad are both in television. I’d spent many a night at Ronnie’s house, at Barney’s house. It was just one of those things where, because of my dad’s friendship with them, I had never dreamt of calling it the Dubliners or anything. But when we got the record deal, the label insisted that we keep the name. I told them no, that’s just the name they’ve given us. The supporters of the band call us The Young Dubs. But we haven’t picked a name yet. They were like, we can’t give you a record deal if you change your name. You’ve just built up this notoriety now in Los Angeles.
I actually had to call Ronnie Drew. I made sure my dad was with him at the time, and told him what I was doing, and how did he feel about it? He just said, keep the name. Brilliant, this is brilliant, because I told them, I hope we’re the next generation of music coming where Irish music is involved. We were taking it to the rock pop level of saying, oh, it happened, the Pogues were already punking it up back in England.
I never really thought it was going to come to anything, so once he gave the alright, it was our way of making sure we got that record deal. We said, okay, we’ll be The Young Dubliners for this EP, and here we are years later. And all I can say to people who make sly little comments about it is I say, it’s a name, as far as I know, the Fine Young Cannibals never ate anybody. We’ve been called that many times, it’s become a name, and I think when people see us, they can see we’re The Young Dubs, it’s just who we’ve always been. Both intellectually and in our brains, we’re still young. We’re still good with that.
Karl Kumli: You have kept the faith, though. There’s a great strand of traditional Celtic music that you have been performing for many years, which You have taken to another level. I think of “Follow Me Up to Carlow” and the treatment that you gave it. Just a tremendous exposition of how Celtic music can be different than what’s come before and how it can grow and evolve.
Keith Roberts: The one thing we discovered early on was that, you can get a crowd riled up in a pub singing, “Follow Me Up to Carlow” a cappella. When we realized that if a song can be that powerful and the lyrics can be that powerful, what would it be if you rocked it up as well? If you added a musical power to it? And I think that’s what gives it such a massive appeal, live in particular, is what we do. We’d record it as a way to put all of those songs into one spot. When people said, which one is your influences, or where did all that stuff come from? We could say, here are the bands with the songs that sort of were the backbone to the idea of what we were going to do. Even though I like to think of us as an original band, if you were going to do a cover album, that was the one I wanted to do. Because it really paid tribute to the great songwriters from Ireland and Canada. That tradition.
When we released albums with some of the Irish stuff, it used to blow me away. You’d be in a music store doing an in store. Remember the old days when they had record stores? We’d be in there doing an in store to announce an album and you would see all the women or the men with their little kids. I’m talking about like kids that can barely walk, holding onto their dad or their mom’s hand. And they would start dancing the minute they heard the Irish tempo, the Irish beats, that sort of tribal drums of “Follow Me Up to Carlow” or any of those almost medieval sounding tracks. It’s served us well. Part of the thing with us is to always be very across all the genres of music, showing how the Irish stuff can blend in with it. We never wanted to just stick to one style, and just sound like the Pogues, or just sound like the Waterboys. The bands that got me going were stuff that I was too young to really get into when it first came out, but then revisited. Once I heard electric guitars playing Celtic rhythms, that was it. I was hooked. And I said, that’s what I want to do. So hopefully that’s what we’ve done. I hope that will be the sort of thing we leave behind. We stayed true to our originality to try to blend this in a way it hadn’t been blended before.
