Sean Cooney of acclaimed folk Act The Young’uns told David Hennessy about 20 years of the band and being inspired by real life stories such as those of Johnny Longstaff, Matthew Ogston and late Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee.
The Young’uns are celebrating two decades of singing together with their current spring 2025 UK tour.
From inauspicious beginnings the trio – comprising Sean Cooney, Michael Hughes & David Eagle – have risen to prominence on the folk scene even winning three coveted BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
The band were teenage friends when they stumbled over folk music in the back room of The Sun Inn in their native Stockton-on-Tees, never knowing that such music existed.
They would make it their mission to celebrate their local music but it’s something that has taken them around the world.
They have often been inspired by figures from real life. The murdered journalist Lyra McKee is the subject of the song, Lyra.
Sean Cooney chatted to us last week as the band kicked off their current tour.
Can you believe it’s been 20 years?
“No. It still feels like we’re kind of starting out in many ways and partly is because we’ve got this weird but funny sort of backstory with being called The Young ‘Uns.
“Obviously that’s a name that’s aged terribly and a name we never really thought too much about.
“When we were teenagers, we had no idea what folk music was until, one night, we were in a pub in our hometown, Stockton-on-Tees in the Northeast and we discovered our local folk club.
“It was just a life changing experience that people were singing songs about where we came from, in our own accents, often without instruments, often with beer in hand.
“And we just didn’t know this kind of thing happened.
“When we started going back every week, we were certainly the youngest people there, sometimes by many decades and it just became our nickname, ‘The young ‘uns’ or ‘the young ones’.
“And if we’d have realised then that 20 years later, we’d be doing it as a career and we’d have gone around the world, we’d have probably thought to ourselves more carefully about what to call ourselves because in many ways, it’s a name that we cringe at but it does remind us of where we come from and our heroes who taught us so much about singing, many of whom are no longer with us now.”
I think it’s a great name because of the story that comes with it. But I see what you mean.
If you’re still going 20 more years, you might cringe even more than calling yourself The Young ‘Uns…
“It’s a good story and that’s part of our motivation in keeping the name.
“The work we do with kids and in schools is because we were just dumbfounded that we didn’t know about local songs, local English northeast songs, about Teesside.
“And we thought, ‘Why didn’t anyone teach us these in school? Why don’t kids know about this?’
“I’ve got Irish heritage and we looked at how (in Irish folk music) the songs are revered and everyone knows them, there’s a respect there and it’s part of the culture.
“Whereas in England, folk music has different connotations.
“It’s suffered with lots of stereotyping.
“Getting back to the joy of communal singing was part of it as well.
“It was how accessible it was.
“Everyone was invited to sing no matter if you had a big voice, a little voice, no matter if you forgot the words, so it belonged to everybody and there was something so pure and beautiful about that.”
Tell us about the Irish heritage you have…
“My granddad was a Mayo man.
“He was born in Achill Island and he came to England.
“He came first in the 40s to Preston, and then he went back to Monaghan so I’ve got an uncle who was born in Monaghan and then he came back over to England to Teesside, and that’s where my dad was born in the 50s.
“We sort of lost touch with our Irish family when I was younger but we reconnected with them in my early 20s and I spent several happy summers busking down the west coast in Westport and Galway and Sligo and had some great times.
“It was very much a Teesside voice that we were looking for and part of that is that there’s a big helping of Irish heritage in Teesside, myself being an example of it.
“When people think of the Northeast of England, they think of Newcastle and they think of Sunderland.
“And people know that the Geordies have songs, they sing them at the football- The Blaydon Races and all that.
“So it felt like they have a folk identity and it feels that people in Yorkshire have one too but our little spot by the river Tees didn’t seem to have one so a big part of our early moves as a band was to sing the songs of Teeside and to really champion it too.
“It’s been such an incredible journey for us because it all kind of started by accident really and we never envisaged a career out of it.
“We’ve always maintained that our singing started in friendship.
“We were three college friends who discovered it together and so we stuck together.
“We still love nothing more than to sing together wherever we are and then there’s a beauty of that we’ve been mainly an unaccompanied group, you can just be in a pub or wherever and just start singing a song and there we go.
“I just thought that my life’s mission should be to preserve and sing these old songs, but you slowly realise that the songs that were written 200 years ago were telling the stories and the struggles of the times they were written in so it just felt a natural progression to start writing songs in it.”
Your song Be The Man was inspired by Matthew Ogston who lost his fiancé and founded the Matt and Naz Foundation to tackle religious and cultural homophobia, the video also features Matthew.
You were moved to commit that story to music, weren’t you?
“Absolutely, yeah.
“So after sort of writing songs about local history and local heritage, I realised these old folk songs were telling the stories of their times and then it just felt right to share amazing, inspirational stories from today in song.
“I still remember vividly reading the article in The Guardian about Matthew Ogston and what he’d been through in 2014 when he lost his partner of 13 years, the man he was going to marry.
“He lost Naz Mahmood, is his beautiful, soon to be husband to suicide, and it was all to do with Naz’s religious family’s reaction to him discovering that he was gay.
“It’s a tragic story but it was the things that Matthew has done in the time since he lost Naz that really motivated me to try and write the song.
“He set up a charity called the Naz and Matt Foundation and he walked from London to Birmingham in 2015. He called it his journey to find acceptance.
“And ever since he’s kind of travelled the country going into colleges and universities, into churches and religious groups, just sharing that story, that pure tragic story but with a great message of hope, of things can be different.
“My impulse as a writer, after reading that incredible piece was, was that ‘I’d love to be able to share the emotional impact it had on me just reading it with other people’, but it took almost a year of thinking about that, very careful thought about that and listening to every interview Matthew had done and watching everything and reading as much as I could before I could ever begin to even put pen to paper.
“But eventually we created the song called Be the Man and and sent it to Matthew.
“Waiting for Matthew’s response to it was one of the most nerve racking experiences but when the reply came, it was just so beautiful.
“And he said, ‘When I heard it, it was like I’d written it myself’, which as a songwriter that just meant so much to me.
“And, as you say, Matthew then agreed to be in the video we made for the song and since come to many shows of ours over the years and we’re proud to be the patrons of the Naz and Matt Foundation charity.”
Another song you have written shares some of those same elements. Sadly suicide and walking in someone’s memory is important to the story of the song, Three Dads Walking.
“It was after writing Be the Man and receiving some amazing responses to it, we sort of then began to develop a reputation for writing songs about real folk stories of today and that’s led to many people writing to us to ask for songs to be written.
“And that was the case with this story.
“Neil Airey, who comes to some of our events, said, ‘Oh, I’d love it if you’d write a song about my brother Andy who’s one of Three Dads Walking.
“I’d heard of the Three Dads Walking and I was watching their story unfold across the news a couple of years ago.
“And basically the tragic story is that the three dads Andy, Mike and Tim, were all united in in grief, each losing a daughter to suicide.
“So tragic and sad and their thing was to walk together.
“They set themselves at a target to raise £1,000 pounds for Papyrus, the prevention of young suicide charity in the UK, but as soon as they started walking, people were just drawn to them everywhere they went.
“The first walk was 300 miles between their three homes across the UK but everywhere they went, people were just drawn to them to share their own experiences.
“The second time they walked, we met them in Cumbria and we sang the song to them and at the end of that walk, they’d raised well over a million for charity.
“And they’d taken a petition to Downing Street that suicide prevention, taught in an age appropriate way, should be on the school curriculum and they’re still pushing for that.
“And they’re just inspirational people to be around and to see the effect that they have, that people come to them who’ve never really spoken about their own grief and their own connections to suicide but to see them open up to the dads, it is just such a beautiful, hopeful thing.”
How did you come to write a song about Lyra McKee, the Northern Irish journalist who was shot and killed at a riot in the Creggan area of Derry, actually 6 years ago last week (18 April)?
“I think with the Lyra song, it almost felt quite different to every song I’d written before.
“It was around that awful Easter when, when Lyra McKee was shot in Derry.
“There was something about her being such a voice for people and such a voice for LGBTQ people, and such a voice for young journalists in Northern Ireland.
“We haven’t really performed it too many times.
“We went to Belfast where there’s a beautiful Lyra mural and met some of her family and sang it there.
“But it’s nice to it’s nice to talk about it.”
What was it like to meet her family and do it over in Belfast though?
“That was really special.
“I think that’s the real sort of trepidation that I always feel on embarking upon these songs, songs about stories that have torn families apart in many ways.
“It’s almost like I’ve walked through the darkest moments of people’s lives sometimes in order to write songs.
“A lot of time when I start I think, ‘Well, should I even be trying to do this?’
“And sometimes I start writing songs and I think, ‘No, I can’t. It’s not the right moment, it’s not the right time’.
“But with the Lyra song, eventually we got to a position where we thought, ‘This is hopefully appropriate to what we want to say in her memory’, and shared it with the family and thankfully they loved it and we’ve kept in touch with them ever since.”
Someone who’s featured in more than one song of yours is Johnny Longstaff.
What was it about Johnny’s story that spoke to you so much?
“The Johnny Longstaff story was given to us in a lovely way almost exactly 10 years ago.
“A man called Duncan Longstaff who, at that point was in his early 70s, came to see us at a show and at the end of the show, he came over to us and said, ‘I’d love it if you could write a song about my dad’.
“And he had a picture of him, a picture of Johnny as a teenage kid in the 1930s with a flat cap and a cheeky grin, selling a newspaper on a street corner.
“And he had this list of information, a chronology of Johnny’s life and the things he’d done in the 30s and it touched upon some of the most defining moments of working class British history: The hunger marches.
“When Johnny was 15, he walked 230 miles to London on a hunger march to demand jobs.
“He took part in the right to roam campaign to free up access to the countryside for working class people.
“He was there at Cable Street in the East End of London in 1936 fighting the blackshirts.
“He volunteered to fight against Franco’s fascists in Spain in the Spanish Civil War when he was 17 years old.
“It was an amazing piece to read and to see the picture.
“Duncan had hoped that we’d write one song about his dad because he knew that we write songs about real people.
“But we were so taken with Johnny and everything he stood for that we ended up writing 17 songs and it became first an album and then a theatre piece as well.”
What is the commonality between these people you write about.
Apart from that they should be remembered and sung about..
“I think with most of these people, it’s people who were, up until that that point that that tragedy or that thing that happened to them, were living ordinary lives with ordinary people, who were just thrown into these incredible circumstances and reacted to them in the best way they could.
“Maybe not with Lyra because that was the other tragedy of Lyra’s story is that she was such an inspirational young voice and would have been a bigger and more influential voice in years to come if tragedy hadn’t struck her that day.
“But you think of Johnny and his voice and sharing his story and so many times we perform it and it resonates with so many people who’ve got family of that generation.
“So many people of that generation did extraordinary things but I think with the Johnny story as well people, particularly in Britain, are used to hearing the voices of the Second World War and they’re familiar with that story but they have no or very little idea of the working class fights on the streets of Britain: The streets of London, the streets of Birmingham. That was so important in standing up to fascism and kind of led to the Second World War and we were never really given in school that working class side of the story.”
What has been a highlight of your journey for you?
“Although we’ve talked a lot about heavy subjects and there are elements of that, we always write from a point of view of hope and change.
“I think for me, personally as a writer, it’s the connections I’ve made through writing the songs and the messages I receive from people telling me how much a song has meant to them or how much it’s changed them and with Be The Man how it’s encouraged people to come out.
“There’s one instance of someone writing to me to say, and then this particular person then had the song played at their wedding two years later.
“When you realise that the power of song to be transformative in people’s lives, that’s what really drives me on.”
The Young ‘Uns are touring the UK until 31 May, they play London’s Union Chapel on Wednesday 23 April.
They also play Doolin Folk Festival in June.
For more information, click here.
