Irish folk favourites perform live in Winkler on March 6
It is hard for George Millar to believe that The Irish Rovers are still “roving” after six decades of playing music.
He may be the last remaining original member, with his brother Will having retired and other members having passed away, but he and the other current Rovers, including a son of one original member, are still keen to keep performing and recording music.
“Sometimes it feels like about a hundred years … this is actually our 60th year. We started in about 1965; I was 16 years old with my brother and my friend Jimmy Ferguson,” Millar recalled in a recent interview in advance of the group’s March 6 show at the P.W. Enns Centennial Concert Hall in Winkler.
“We were playing the folk clubs across America and Canada, and we thought we would give it a year to see how it went, and it went fairly well. So after all these years, we’re still saying oh, we’ll give it one more year and see how it goes.
“As long as we’re doing the same type of show and the same songs, people seem to be all right with it.”
The Irish Rovers are kicking off the St Patrick’s Day season with a tour and a release of their latest album.
After years of wanting to record a homegrown album, The Rovers finally hit the mark with The Belfast Sessions, Millar said. It was recorded last year at RedBox Studios in Belfast.
“It’s been wonderful bringing everyone together in the same space after all those remote recording and file-sharing sessions we did the past few years, including COVID,” he said. “RedBox is on three floors of a Victorian house in the city, and it’s run by Dónal O’Connor, the son of our fiddle player Gerry O’Connor. We recorded parts of tracks in rooms on the different floors. I put ideas down a scratch track to give the other lads an idea of the tempo and the phrasing of the songs.”
The Rovers have been in the spotlight for decades. In 2023, they cracked Spotify’s Viral Top 50 in both the US and UK/Ireland. That year they released No End In Sight featuring their 1977 version of “The Wellerman” and a new anthem for the era, “Hey Boys Sing Us A Song,” which earned a Canadian Folk Music Awards nomination for 2023 single of the year.
The band nicknamed themselves “Dinosaurs” on the final track of the most recent album as a nod to the seasoned, crusty musicians who have paid their dues and kept going in a hostile environment for their survival
Canada has long been home to The Irish Rovers since their early-60s inception.
“It’s a bit odd being from both Ireland and Canada. The fans have found it confusing too,” said Millar, who noted this sense of dual identity inspired him to write “Band Without A Country” from the 2020 album Saints And Sinners, which was a song and video tracing their journey from Ireland to Toronto and beyond.
Their breakout era began in 1967 with the album The Unicorn, whose title track propelled the band from folk clubs to concert halls and TV worldwide.
To honor its 50th anniversary in 2017, The Rovers released The Unicorn, The Continuing Story, featuring new recordings of the original album plus a sequel that answers the age-old question: what happened to the Unicorns when the ark left them stranded on shore?
Their most famous song of course really brought them an entirely different level of fame, and Millar noted it is interesting to think it is a song that might be both sung by kids in Sunday school and people in pubs with pints of beer in hand.
“It was the very last song we recorded on that record … it was all Irish drinking songs basically, and the producer said, ‘Do you have anything slightly different?’”
The Irish Rovers was the first Irish band to play the Grand Ole Opry, and in 1971 they hosted the first of three TV series: CBC’s The Irish Rovers Show, which ran seven seasons and won the ACTRA award for best variety performance.
Since 2010, the band has returned to television with more international specials, letting fans revisit the same early CBC-era locales.
It’s been quite a ride, Millar said in reflecting on his storied career.
“When I arrived in the USA from Ballymena, people from the north were an unknown quantity, and luckily for me, almost as soon as I arrived, Tommy Makem took me under his wing. We found that we shared so much through music.
“There was a huge appetite for folk music, and we were all young and able to party after a gig, and the after hours singing sessions were legendary. We’d meet all sorts of people who were passing through such as the Wolfe Tones and Kris Kristofferson and his wife Rita Coolidge. Soon a supportive network began to grow up around us.”
Millar observed that there is an eternal appeal to Irish and Celtic music.
“It’s a happy style of music … and even if we’re singing about some poor Irishman who was caught and hung and drawn and quartered back in the 1700s, it’s still an uplifting sort of tune behind the words,” he said. “I’m not sure that people understand some of the words, but the tunes themselves … I suppose it’s like a good polka. If you don’t particularly like polka, if you’re close enough to it, your toe will start tapping.
“I think Irish music just has that kind of appeal. It’s just sort of an uplifting type of music, and it’s probably that music that has kept the Irish music going, that and their humour, has kept them going for 800 years through famines and all sorts of different oppressions.
“Music is so important. It’s an artwork; it’s one of the oldest arts in the world, and I don’t think there’s a civilization in this world that doesn’t have music.”
Millar added that they are “very blessed that our fans, after all these years, are still coming out to see us, and that’s great. What is really nice about Irish and Celtic music in general is that the young people are still into it … you don’t see it in too many other places. We’re still seeing a lot of younger people coming, and that is always great to see.”
After 60 years on the road, Millar can offer some advice to young musicians just starting out:
“Firstly, perform as if you’re really enjoying it. Of course you should enjoy every gig, but when you are on the road full-time, there will be some shows that are better than others. The audience have paid part of their hard-earned wages to see you, so give them 110 per cent, connect with them, share stories, tell jokes and choruses.
“The second thing is to get on together as a band, enjoy your time and give your band mates space when they need it. An opportunity to make music with your friends does not come along every day.”
