Fiachna Ó Braonáin of Hothouse Flowers told David Hennessy about 40 years of the band.
Hothouse Flowers will return to the UK in 2025 to celebrate their iconic albums People (1988) and Home (1990).
Known for songs like Don’t Go, Give it Up and I Can See Clearly Now, it will be 40 years since the Hothouse Flowers first formed.
The band, comprising Liam Ó Maonlaí and Fiachna Ó Braonáin et al, gained attention playing the venues of Dublin as well as busking on the streets.
The traction led to the band signing with U2’s label Mother Records.
The way they blended genres and their live reputation meant that their debut album was an instant hit and flew to top spot in the Irish charts and no.2 in the UK charts becoming the most successful Irish album in history. Reaching similar acclaim, Home followed the success of their debut.
The Dublin band would share a bill with INXS and Deborah Harry at Wembley Stadium in 1991 as well as playing other massive stages like Glastonbury.
Fiachna Ó Braonáin from the band spoke to us last week about the band’s forthcoming tour.
Can you believe it’s 40 years next year since you formed the band? Did you think all the way back then that you would still be doing it after all these years?
“You know, in a funny way, we did.
“I think music had such a powerful pull for us as kids that it was what we all wanted to do, certainly for myself and Liam. It was what we wanted to do with our lives completely.
“It’s just what we wanted to devote our lives to.
“I suppose when you have that urge that is sort of more powerful than anything else, you don’t see it as being something that is finite or that has a retirement date.
“I’m thrilled that it’s worked out this way, that we continue and that we continue allowing one another the freedom to do whatever else outside of the band as well.
“Because a lot of people can instil in you the feeling that the band is the only thing that matters and it’s the most important thing in your life and everything else must be sacrificed to allow for the band.
“While that kind of conviction is valuable, certainly when you’re starting out because it gives you that sort of absolutely complete blind self- belief.
“As you get older as well, you realise that no, you allow other things to come in. You have to allow other things to come in, things that are that are actually more important like family, like health, like all the fundamentals of life.
“Then you find a way of allowing one another the space and giving each other, actually, the respect of having that space to do other stuff and for the band’s existence not to be the be all and end all.
“I think that has been crucial to our longevity.”
Don’t Go has gone on to become so well known. Did you know what you had when you first wrote it?
“No, we didn’t know what we had.
“When we wrote that song, we were in our early 20s and our dynamic urge at the time was to play really up tempo songs.
“We thought that singles needed to be really up tempo and Don’t Go was more like a mid tempo ballad.
“It wasn’t until we started recording it and listening back to it ourselves that we started hearing what everybody else heard in it which was the potential to be a hit song.
“We didn’t consciously set about to make it sound like it, it just came naturally to us but people, I think, felt that it sounded international yet Irish at the same time.
“There was something maybe in the instrumentation or just in the feel of it that there was a Celtic, Irish influence in there somewhere, even though it was ostensibly also a pop song.
“It’s amazing how it connected.
“It’s been a great song for us.”
You also learned your trade busking, didn’t you?
“We did a lot of busking.
“The band actually started in April of 1985 then Liam and I went busking in June, July, August of that same year.
“So the band had actually started and had done a few gigs before we took to the streets.
“I think we just did it because it was fun but also because it would earn a few quid.
“Liam was paying the rent.
“He had a flat in Dublin that he needed to pay the rent for every week and he used to ring me every now and then and go, ‘The rent is due today. Can we go in and do a bit of busking?’
“And we just ended up doing it every day and it popularised us as a duo.
“People would come up to us and ask us, ‘Where are you playing?’
“Back in those days, there was no amplification in the streets, nor was there any needed.
“We just went in and made as much noise as we could.
“That kind of stage craft when you don’t have a stage, when you’re living depends on you attracting the biggest crowd you can and making them feel generous, which we did by being larger than life, by doing formation dancing, by singing in harmony, by having lots of energy, and by being essentially fearless- I suppose it gave us a lot of confidence.”
What did it mean to get the support of Bono and U2?
“Getting the support of Bono was great.
“He was our biggest rock and roll star at the time and U2 had travelled the world and were playing big, big shows everywhere.
“Bono was just incredibly generous, incredibly humble and just extended the hand of support and the hand of friendship really.
“We ended up doing our first single with Mother Records and it got the attention of the UK record industry.
“I remember we were in Wembley Stadium one day watching U2 and being being courted by record labels during the day at various meetings.
“We ended up going with London Records.
“The record industry has changed hugely since then.
“But back in those days, the model was you did your record contract and they provided you with the funds to be able to go and make records. That’s what we did.
“London Records gave us the financial support to be able to tour and little do you know that you owe every single penny of that back at the end of the day.
“We never really made a penny from records is the irony.
“But what we did achieve was a level of success that once that first wave ended, we were able to carry on and still carry on as independent artists ever since.
“We have been independent artists effectively since the mid 90s.
“We don’t have that big machine behind us anymore but the machine that we did have behind us back then got us to a level where the phone still rings and people still come to see us play.
“That’s something that’s worth celebrating.”
The band had to take a break around 1994 after constant touring.
You just weren’t enjoying it anymore, was that it?
“No, we weren’t.
“Well, I suppose if I’m being completely honest, I was enjoying it but I can’t speak for everybody and I can’t speak to the health of the band as an entire organism which is what it is.
“It’s a combination of five fellas devoting their lives to being on the road and so on.
“And at that time, we were eight years in to a treadmill: Very exciting, fantastic in so many ways but it was impacting on mind, body and soul after a while.
“I think it was a very wise call to make by Liam to put the instruments back in the cupboard or put the band back in the cupboard for a year, which is what we did.
“And then that was actually the beginning.
“That was the year that enabled us to achieve what I was talking about earlier which is to be able to give one another the space and the respect to be individuals and to carry on your life outside the band and for it not to be a threat to the band.
“That’s ultimately what has happened.
“It was great but there were times when I remember coming home from a tour and only being at home for five days and then heading off on another tour.
“And five days wasn’t enough time just to decompress and reconnect with family.
“And when you don’t have enough time to do that, your body kind of goes into a panic sort of mode and then you’re going back out on the road.
“One of the cliches that people always said about being on the road is that you kind of put your emotions on hold and it’s true to some degree because you come home and you want to reconnect with where you come from and your family.
“By 1990 I had young kids and to come home and reconnect with them.
“And I don’t think I had a mobile phone until the very late 90s, if not the early 2000s.
“It was a very different time in terms of being able to keep in touch with family.
“Nowadays no matter where you are in the world, you’re you’re a text message away or a FaceTime away from checking in with family and with people and it makes the world a much smaller place. That’s been amazing but back in those days if you’re in America, you’re firing coins into a telephone, looking to reverse the charges and all that kind of thing.
“It’s a very brief kind of once a week, ‘Yeah, everything’s okay. How’s everybody there? Fantastic’.
“It doesn’t really cover much ground, that’s not so much the case anymore if you’re away.”
What would have been the highlights for you of those incredible times?
“Well, there’s nothing really like when you hear an audience singing back the words of your songs, when you drop it down and you hand the chorus over and they start singing your melodies back to you.
“It gives you that feeling of like, ‘Oh, we’ve done it. We’re sharing this with 10, 20, 30, 50, 80,000 people, and they’re all singing the chorus back’.
“I remember looking at a review of the that very INXS gig in Wembley Stadium.
“Q magazine wrote highlight of the day, 80,000 people singing the chorus of I Can See Clearly Now back to the Hothouse Flowers’.
“What an amazing feeling, accolade that was, and then there’s people and places that you get to visit.”
Liam Ó Maonlaí spoke about how singing Carrickfergus in Wembley Arena told him about the power of music and culture.
In the times it was, it meant a great deal to see a sean-nós song in Irish and English meant a great deal.
Was that a powerful moment?
“It was brilliant.
“Yeah, incredible to belt out a song, a sean-nós song in a place like Wembley Arena and reduce the place to pin drop silence.
“Very powerful.”
Fiachna has also done much Irish language work with TG4.
Of course the Irish language wasn’t always as trendy as it certainly seems now with the resurgence it has seen in recent years.
What has it been like to see that having been in favour of it all the time?
“After this I’m getting in the car and I’m heading up to Tyrone where I’m presenting a TV series for BBC Northern Ireland Irish Language Programmes.
“What an amazing thing that is, the very fact that BBC Northern Ireland Irish Language Programmes exists.
“Myself and a singer called Eve Bell are presenting a new series called Ceolta on air next year.
“It’s celebrating the music venues of Ulster.
“When you think of the division and how the Irish language was treated over the years by what were imperialist forces or colonising forces and to come to a point now where it has turned around.
“The Irish language, because of the brutality with which it was treated, ended up having its own sort of feelings of shame attached to it here in Ireland where people felt the only way forward was to suppress it here ourselves and, ‘Oh yeah, you need to learn English to get a job’ and whatever.
“For it now to come back around and to become popular again even among young people now as well.
“I mean, there are still people who consider it a backward language and there’s no point in it which I don’t subscribe to at all, never did.
“For me it’s a direct link to the land, it’s a direct link to our ancestors.
“It’s a direct link to our words and songs and poetry and a link to our existence.
“You go up to Belfast now, the road signs in many parts of Belfast are bilingual.
“It is beautiful.
“And there’s lots of artists now using Irish and not in a forced way, a way that is very second nature.”
Are there any plans for new Hothouse Flowers music?
“Yeah, there’s an urge to make new music. Planning is where we fall down because we all have busy lives outside of the band.
“If we find three or four or five new ideas, then another three or four or five more will come in.
“Before we know it, we’ll have the guts of an album.
“(We could do an album in the )next few years, that’s about as realistic as I can put it but absolutely there’s an urge there, there’s a desire to do it.
“It’s the kind of thing that could happen very quickly actually once it does happen, I think.
“I think there’s a wealth of material waiting to emerge.”
The band’s saxophone player Leo Barnes passed away in 2022.
“We certainly think about Leo every time we play.
“There’s a bunch of songs that we play, If You Go which is a sister song to Don’t Go in a way and Leo’s incredible saxophone playing in that song is obviously much missed.
“Liam often plays the melody of those saxophone lines on the piano now.
“We hold the people who are gone, people like Sinéad (O’Connor) and people like Shane (MacGowan) and, of course, Leo in our hearts as we as we move around.
“It’s nice to think that their spirits are all around us at all times.”
There’s no regrets, are there? We spoke about the touring getting too much and not enjoying it.
You don’t look back with any regrets about anything like that, do you?
“Oh God no, not at all.
“Everything you’ve done, good and bad, all adds up to your life experience, and life is good.
“It’s not always easy.
“And you gotta fend for your family and fend for your values and all of that.
“We need values in this world nowadays, more than ever.
“In a world that has been decimated by capitalism and greed and male egos gone completely crazy, music, I think, is super important.
“I’ve recently been looking at musicians in Gaza who are making gorgeous music sitting in the rubble of their former homes, they’re still making music and putting it out in the world.
“There’s something timeless and magical about that and there’s something obviously very healing in music.
“It’s a reminder that we’re really, really privileged to do what we do and complaining about the rigors of the road or whatever doesn’t really wash because we’ve been given this gift that is a precious thing to take into the world.”
Hothouse Flowers tour the UK in June 2025.
They play Boilershop, Newcastle on 6 June, Mancheseter O2 Ritz on 7 June, Cheese & Grain in Frome on 8 June, Komedia, Bath on 10 June,
Sheffield Leadmill on 11 June, Birmingham O2 Institute on 12 June, London O2 Forum in Kentish Town on 13 June.
They also play Queen’s Park, Glasgow on 27 June and The Factory Live! in Worthing on 29 June.
For more information, click here.
