The day after last year’s Electric Picnic Festival, the Irish press wasn’t talking about headliner Billie Eilish, or a new buzz band that had captured the attention of the youthful audience. Instead, the spotlight was stolen by the Wolfe Tones, a trio of septuagenarian folk balladeers, that drew a record crowd to a tent stage. As has often been the case over the group’s six decades singing rebel songs, their appearance was both celebrated and lambasted, especially when their fans loudly sang along to “Celtic Symphony” with its chorus “Up the Ra,” a term long associated with the Irish Republican Army. In the last two years the song, which was first released in the late 1980s, has been both a lightning rod and a number one hit.
The newfound attention comes as the group, named for 18th-century Irish rebel Theobald Wolfe Tone, is on its farewell tour, which hits the Strand Theatre in Dorchester on Saturday before culminating in a pair of sold-out shows at a Dublin arena in October.
“Tommy [Byrne] and Noel [Nagle] are 80 this year, and Tommy always said, ‘I’m not going to go past 80,’” explains founding member Brian Warfield, 77, on a video call from Ireland.
The group has never considered bringing in younger members to keep the name going. “We’ve been highly successful for all those 60 years, so we’ll leave it as it is,” says Warfield. “We’ve had loads and loads of followers, and to put new members in might disappoint people, so at the end of the day I’d like to finish up with the same members that started off 60 years ago.”
Well, almost the same. Citing “artistic differences,” Warfield’s brother Derek left in 2001 and started the Young Wolfe Tones, and the two have rarely spoken since. It’s become a St. Patrick’s Day tradition for both groups to be in Massachusetts at the same time, and this year the Young Wolfe Tones appear at the Hibernian Cultural Centre in Worcester on Friday and at Donovan’s Irish Pub in Holyoke on Sunday.
Brian Warfield chuckles when asked if there’s any chance that Derek will join in the farewell shows. “I don’t think people would expect it,” he says. Asked if there’s ever confusion when both acts are on tour, Brian Warfield says, “It probably confused some people, but fortunately enough we are probably the band that gets the most people. Derek plays very small gigs where we tend to play bigger arenas and concert halls. People know and understand who the Wolfe Tones are.” (An email requesting an interview with Derek did not receive a response.)
Warfield says the band first came to Boston in 1966 for an event at the New State Ballroom on Massachusetts Avenue and would frequently tour the area twice a year. At times the marquee of the IBEW Hall in Dorchester seemed to be permanently promoting Wolfe Tones appearances to drivers on I-93. When not playing rebel anthems, the band referenced Boston in songs of immigration including “Boston Rose” and “Flight of Earls.” The band popularized “The Fighting 69th” before Boston’s Dropkick Murphys recorded it. (Warfield admits he hasn’t heard their version.)
It’s not surprise that the Wolfe Tones’ republican anthems have been well received here, says Boston College history professor Robert Savage. “The Fenians, who launched the rebellion in 1867, received support from people in cities like Boston. Groups like NORAID provided money and support for families of those who were incarcerated, but also money for weapons that helped the IRA. [Sinn Féin leader] Gerry Adams made his way here for the peace process because he had to convince an American audience that the path he was choosing was the right one.”
Savage first saw the Wolfe Tones in concert in Waltham in the late 1970s. “The music was rowdy and raucous and the crowd was the same. I thought they were playing it up for an American crowd, but then I saw them in Dublin and they had the same reaction — unbridled enthusiasm. And this was at a time when the relationship between the music and the Troubles in Ireland was hard to ignore.”
“Rebel music has this innate attraction to a youthful audience that likes an aggressive stance,” adds Savage. “There’s an attraction to looking at things simplistically when it might be more troubling to understand the complexities and hurt and pain that all that violence has caused.”
Warfield has been hearing these criticisms for decades and calls any implications that his music celebrates terrorism “totally unfair.”
“They’ve tried to label and demonize it. But I go back to the 1960s, a time of great change, and just as the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests were happening in the US, in Ireland we were picking up on Irish issues and bringing them to the fore, and writing songs about them, and telling the world about what we thought were injustices in our country.”
“Celtic Symphony,” says Warfield, was “written about a football club in Glasgow. I was looking at the graffiti at the wall and it says ‘Up the South’ and underneath it ‘Up the Ra.’ So that’s the line that a lot of people took objection to, because you weren’t allowed to write about the IRA at the time, so people called it ‘the RA’. And now that song has gone everywhere.”
The Wolfe Tones’ late-career surge comes as Sinn Féin, once the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, is “now the biggest political party in both parts of Ireland,” notes Savage. Asked if this turn of events has helped the Wolfe Tones, Warfield says with a laugh, “I think the band brought success to Sinn Féin.”
THE WOLFE TONES
At the Strand Theatre, 543 Columbia Road, Dorchester. March 9 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets $55-$95. universe.com
Noah Schaffer can be reached at noahschaffer@yahoo.com.