Slug will sing an Irish song in Sub-Saharan Botswana

Later this year, Connemara outfit Ten Ton Slug are aiming to become the first metal band to sing a song as Gaeilge in Botswana.   On November 31, the Slugs will take to the stage at Vulture Thrust: Anger Management Festival 2025 in Maun, after playing a warm-up show in Ghanzi the previous night.

Sean Sullivan, who founded the group with his brother Mícheál over a decade ago, hopes their message may resonate with the Botswana audience.

“It’s not so often that you get a chance to do something a bit out there like this,” he says.

“We’re not 100 per cent absolutely certain that no metal band has ever performed a song in Irish there, but it is extremely doubtful.

“I’d imagine a couple of trad bands have been in that part of the world and I’d imagine there have of course been Irish songs played. But for metal songs, I don’t think so.

“The other thing we’d like to highlight when we’re there is that the song [as Gaeilge] is called Mallacht an tSloda, ‘the curse of the slug’, but it’s about cursing your oppressor and working together to fight against oppression.

“Given the part of the world that they’re from and the history of apartheid in South Africa and things like that, I think culturally we’ll see eye to eye on the subject.”

The genesis for this trip goes back as far as 2019, when Ten Ton Slug declined an invitation to perform a similarly unusual gig in a faraway land.

“It stuck with all of us that we missed an opportunity in a sense,” Sullivan says. “We said right, if we get something like this again, we’re just going to do it. We’re not going to hum and haw about it; we’re just going to make it happen.”

Over covid, daydreaming of a return to live music, Sullivan saw an article on Botswana metal cowboys in the Kalahari Desert. A member of Overthrust, one of the bands mentioned in the piece, were said to organise festivals in the region, and thus Vulture Thrust were officially on his radar.

Pictured: Ten Ton Slug...making history in Botswana.