Jerry Fish & The Mudbugs let the good times roll

Jerry Fish & The Mudbug Club who play Róisín Dubh on Saturday, December 19 are a hugely popular live draw but, like everyone else, Jerry Fish admits they’re feeling the pinch this year.“We’re all in the same boat,” he says. “Record sales are being affected; everything is. But it’s been great to get an album out, it’s always good to get it off your chest and get it out there. The shows have been really good.”The band’s latest album The Beautiful Untrue was one of 2009’s most impressive releases and Jerry and his gang will be on top form for their Róisín Dubh show. It’s a venue Jerry enjoys performing in, particularly since its renovation over five years ago.“As a performer, it’s definitely better,” he enthuses. “Before there was an L-shaped room so there was always a corner you couldn’t reach. Now it’s straight on, everyone can see the show. I much prefer it. Particularly with what I do, it’s important to see faces. I’ve always got off on that really.”How did the Mudbug Club and Jerry go about making the album?“The album was done commando style, if you will,” he says. “It was done everywhere really. I hired a basement in Temple Bar for four to six months to write the record. That’s where songs like Hole In The Boat come from. The chorus goes ‘everybody know the ship is sinking/there’s a hole in the boat/but still we row’.“In the basement, I felt like I was in the bilge of the ship pumping out water,” he adds. “I’d come up on deck and there’d be a carnival on and nobody noticed there was a gashing big hole in the boat.”Given such lyrical concerns, it’s no surprise that the album was praised by critics as an uplifting response to the recession – even if that’s not what Jerry intended.“You would think it’s about the recession but really it was about before that, I thought we were all high on money. It probably will be looked at as the Irish crime of the century, the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’.”Yet Jerry Fish is optimistic about the future, something that is borne out in the good-time feeling of the Mudbugs’ music and live shows.“I just think, no matter how broken things are and get, we still just carry on,” he says. “Our instinct is just to keep going. Most of us still have shoes on our feet, y’know, and food in our bellies. The world is full of inequality; once that’s there, there’ll always be sh*t. The key is just to try and get yourself happy somehow, whether that’s spiritual or whatever. I kind of do that through music and playing to audiences.”Jerry Fish & The Mudbug club delivered one of the singles of the year with Back To Before, a melancholy but beautiful waltz that would be at home in Sinatra’s canon.“The seed of it was a friend of mine, his wife passed away,” Jerry explains. “I think that sparked the idea of ‘losing everything to the world’. Like I said, the human being is so amazing that they can continue after the most devastating of circumstances.”Earlier this year Jerry and the band played a concert on the DART to mark the Dublin suburban rail line’s 25th anniversary, an experience he thoroughly enjoyed.“I loved that!” he recalls. “I thought ‘oh no, this is an all time low, I’m playing on the DART’ but it was fantastic. We did four shows of 30, 45 minutes – it was quite exhausting – to four different audiences. They had four different carriages; David Kitt was on one, The Coronas were on another and I think they had a comedian on the fourth. We went from Connolly to Howth, then Howth to Connolly, then Connolly to Bray, then Bray back to Connolly again. It was a really well put together evening.”This month, Jerry Fish and his motley crew will also be opening for Imelda May for her triumphant, hometown show in the O2. “Imelda May’s a very old friend,” Jerry says. “We go back to when she was a teenager. I’d seen her perform at a party years ago; I’m friends with her in-laws. The bass player in the Mudbug Club has played with Imelda as well. So we’re all old friends; Imelda was on the [new Mudbug] album just before she took off. It’s great what’s happened to Imelda, she’s such a hard worker. Herself and her husband, Darryl, are amazing.”A veteran of the music business since his days with An Emotional Fish, Jerry knows all about the work ethic required to last in the fickle industry.“It’s not the easiest of roads,” he admits. “The music industry has been turned on its head in the last five years. I’ve been around for the last 25, but for the last 5 it’s completely changed and it still hasn’t fully come out as what it’s going to end up as.”Jerry Fish released The Mudbug albums on his own label and is enjoying the challenges being presented to musicians at the moment.“The live music used to be to promote your record,” he says. “People are going to see live music more, which is great; you can make a living from that. The other thing that’s interesting, that’s come full circle, is now people are buying singles. So the album is kind of in jeopardy, everyone one is wondering will the album survive.“But then if you look back, Elvis never made any albums. It was The Beatles and The Stones, and that era, that started the album. So we may be going back to what went on before, people are just going to put down killer tracks.”Ultimately, the Jerry Fish & The Mudbug club experience is about letting the good times roll. When this circus comes to the Róisín Dubh, its ringmaster will be glad to be leading the charge.“If you love doing something, you’re lucky if you can do it and make a living from it.”

Tickets for Jerry Fish & The Mudbug Club are €22.50/20. Doors 9pm.