Even In A Quiet Year, The Mary Wallopers Keep Making Noise

Charles Hendy is on edge. It's a late night when he calls in to speak with The Music – early morning for us Australians – and his band, Irish folk-punk quintet The Mary Wallopers, are driving through enemy territory.

“We're on a run of European shows at the moment,” he explains, “and we're driving through England on our way to Cardiff.” He belly laughs at the notion of the tense Irish folk heading through the UK.

“Look, we'll be fine,” he says. “Just gotta get past the border!”

It's nice to hear Hendy laugh after the ordeal that he and his bandmates went through just two weeks ago. When stepping out on stage to perform at the Portsmouth music festival Victorious, Hendy began what would have been their set by saying “Free Palestine, and fuck Israel” while bassist Róisín Barrett hung a Palestinian flag from her amp.

As the band attempted to start their set, however, the festival cut the power to the stage – with a stage worker telling them they would only be allowed to perform if the flag was removed.

The group's protest made international headlines, gaining support from Kneecap and The Last Dinner Party, and raised an important, ongoing discussion of festivals wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

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Major festivals in 2025 have been booking politically driven acts such as Kneecap and Bob Vylan to perform due to their massive popularity, then clutching their pearls when they bring politics into their performances. “They're out of touch cunts that only care about money,” says Hendy. “That's what it comes down to.

“At the end of it, they're dogs and pigs of people. It's capitalism, and it's propaganda, and it's what makes genocides like this continue. It's all that you're fed from when you're young, by the same sort of people who want to silence people for telling the truth. Money and power are the only things that these people care about, so fuck them. More egg on their face. They're that out of touch, they don't even realise what they're doing.”

With that storm in a teacup in the band's rearview mirror, the Wallopers are focused on the bigger picture: Not just their ongoing advocacy and Palestinian solidarity, but their third studio album.

The follow-up to 2023's Irish Rock N Roll has been slowly stewing in the background as the band has continued to meet their demand as a live act across the world – and, believe it or not, being in the UK has served as a great inspiration to Hendy's songwriting. “At home, there's too many distractions,” he reasons.

“Sitting down at a desk trying to write... it's the single worst way to do it. I'll just end up getting distracted and going to do some gardening instead. You have to be out in the world, ready to catch ideas where they land.

“We sing so many songs about the Irish abroad, and being in places the Irish have spent so much time like London and Cricklewood allows me to put myself in that in a very literal sense,” he adds. “It's folk music, y'know? Nobody wants to hear an album of songs about a tour bus. These are songs of parity.”

As work has continued on album number three for the folk-punks, new material has slowly begun to drip out. The first was a collaborative track with the Dropkick Murphys, who enlisted the group on the song Bury The Bones back in July for the Dropkicks' 13th album For The People.

Per Hendy, the collaboration between the two Celtic-leaning punk acts stemmed from a direct message sent by Dropkicks leader Ken Casey. “When the offer came through that he wanted us to do a song with them, the answer was 'absolutely' straight away,” says Hendy.

“It was all over the phone, as it were – going back and forth on these ideas on the song. We knew it was going to be a protest song of some description, but it took these sessions to really figure out what we wanted to do. It felt like an antidote to everything that was happening in the world – and still is happening. We've yet to meet face-to-face to thank them, but I know it won't be long before we're all having a pint together.

The collaboration meant a lot to Hendy, who grew up listening to the band and was inspired to make his own music blending a love of Celtic music, folk songs and punk rock the same way they did.

“We have a hell of a lot of respect for the Dropkick Murphys,” he says. “They've been doing this Irish music to an American audience, and been putting it on this worldwide stage, for almost 30 years. I don't see a lot of bands using their platform for politics in America the way that they do.”

The other, released just weeks later, was a new single entitled The Juice. Inspired by an old street poem and nursery rhyme, One For Sorrow, the self-described “song for all the exhausted people” had its accompanying one-take music video shot on location at Clochafarmore Standing Stone in County Louth – roughly a ten-minute drive from where the band members grew up in Dundalk.

“They're ancient mythological and spiritual sites, these standing stones,” says Hendy. “But to us, they were just the places that we hung out when we were growing up. It's easy to take them for granted. The idea for the video was to just hang around the stone the same way we did when we were kids – we wanted something easy. It's not played up. All these people making expensive music videos? We're surely beyond that at this stage.”

As for the karaoke-style lyrics superimposed over the top? “Everything has the fucking lyrics on them nowadays anyway!” Hendy laughs. “It's good for people to see what they're singing along to, anyway.”

This is true – after all, lots of singing takes place at The Mary Wallopers' shows. Except for that one show at Victorious Festival... they seemed pretty quiet there, for some reason. “I know, right?” says Hendy. “It's like that 15 seconds of music wasn't enough!”

Tickets to The Mary Wallopers’ Australian tour are on sale now.