Bringing it back to basics – and eleven guitarists!

In theory, the White Horse Guitar Club shouldn’t work; eleven men, all wielding guitars, singing folk and americana ballads – it is a reinvention of the band format that could well have been overkill…if it weren’t for the harmony, both social and melodic, among its cast.

Over the next couple of months, the Club bring their show back to Galway; first, on Sunday September 21, they perform at the Clifden Arts Festival, and then on Sunday, November 30, they finish out their latest tour in the Town Hall Theatre.

“If we planned it, we’d be geniuses,” says one of the project’s key guitarists and former Rubyhorse frontman Joe Philpott.

“The idea originally was to meet up on a Thursday night, or whatever it was, to have a few pints and play a few tunes. We put an APB out for anybody wanting to join a guitar club. There were no criteria needed; we didn’t even know what a guitar club was. We thought [it was for] guitar enthusiasts who were bored and looking for stuff to do.

“A bunch of people showed up but pretty soon it whittled down to the eleven of us that are there to this day. We were knocking around with different types of songs and one night, we were playing a song that’s a staple in our set now – it’s called Wide River to Cross. Something happened. Eleven voices kicked in to what was a solo, singer and his guitar type of song. This sound appeared out of nowhere really. We got chills.”

It all came together in the upstairs venue of Philpott’s brother-in-law’s pub, the White Horse in Ballincollig, Co Cork.

The space is still a central club facility for practice, performance and recording. Philpott is an experienced, high-level musician, but the ethos of the project has resonated with him in a different way to his past commitments.

“It never had a plan,” he says. “I was in a band before called Rubyhorse. We went to the States and had a top 20 song in the Billboard charts. I played with George Harrison from the Beatles, and it was a huge career thing. We did Conan [O’Brien] and all those late-night TV shows. It was always life or death and there was always a plan or a goal. It had this ambition attached to it.

“This has absolutely none of that. For me, it was a welcome release to be able to show up with an acoustic guitar and not have two amps, fifty pedals and a thousand miles to travel. It just [felt like] meeting friends and having a bit of a gathering.”

Pictured: Back for more...the White Horse Guitar Club on their previous visit to Galway, at the Róisín Dubh.