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After long corona limitations, Saint Patrick’s Day 2022 suddenly was GO! We played 5 gigs around that time, including the biggest Dutch Saint Patrick’s Day Festival in Den Haag. Although with Gosse falling ill the night before, it almost didn’t happen. Later that spring, in came Sebastiaan, a fabulous guitar player. A few nice festivals were played over the summer, such as Hrieps Festival in Grijpskerk and Hootchiekoe Festival in Varsseveld. After serious rehearsing and a string of gigs in October, we went into the studio. With the arrival of Sebastiaan, the return of gigging and the successful recording weekend, 2022 was a rather good year, the best since 2019.
We can be short about this year. Two shows in autumn, the Craft Beer Festival in Delft being a bag of fun. But that was it. Full stop.
Things looked bright in 2020, at least for about ten weeks. We played a folkpunk night in Rotterdam with Circle J and (again) the Irish Pub Fest in Deventer. At a late February gig, we had an Alkmaar pub packed to the rafters and sweat dropping from the ceiling. We were sharp and all set to play a really nice series of gigs around Saint Patrick’s Day and some nice festivals in the summer. We were to debut at the famous Saint Patrick’s Day Festival in Den Haag and our Saint Patrick’s gig at Bibelot, Dordrecht, was to be recorded and filmed. And we would … and we would …
Then the corona shit hit the fan. Just a few days before Saint Patrick’s Day, the country went into lockdown, we even didn’t rehearse for a while …
BoB played almost 20 shows in 2019, the first good year since 2016 (and little could we yet know of more bad years to come). We played Deventer Irish Pub Festival again, we celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day with a string of gigs including one in Bibelot with Royal Spuds, we again played support for the great Ferocious Dog and we set off to France for a weekend of gigs. Over the summer we played two festivals: Willems Wondere Weiland and Night of the Kilts Festival (Ger.). In autumn, Gosse joined our ranks on guitar and mandoline (he would add banjo and tin whistle later). Some pub gigs were played, new songs entered the setlist and things looked bright.
2018 was a mixed bag. Things didn’t work out with our second singer. He wasn’t the kind of bastard we’d hoped he’d be, and he couldn’t memorize lyrics (who’d ever think about checking this at audition?). After a series of no-fun-at-all Saint Patrick’s Day gigs (no fun for us at least, fingers crossed the audience had a good time after all), we gave him the boot. Regrettably, gigs had to be canceled, apart from two spring shows where Paul Henshaw (see 2016) saved our asses by stepping in to sing with us. One of those shows was at Bibelot, Dordrecht, also featuring Paul Henshaw, Nick Parker and Circle J.
So auditioning began again, us being more cautious this time. This time round, however, we were very lucky indeed, running into Jasper, half-Irish, a great bloke with a great voice, and on top of that a great songsmith too. So after a stand-still of about a year, we at BoB could look upward and forward again. Gigging resumed in autumn.
2017 saw us playing 20 gigs, starting off at Irish Pub Festival in Deventer and throwing a Saint Patrick’s Day party in Hagen (Ger.) with local heroes The Ceili Family. We shared two long weekends of gigging and having loads of fun and drinks with our Czech buddies Pirates of the Pubs, them being over in the low countries and us playing gigs with them in various towns in Bohemia, Praha included, throwing in some serious sightseeing at famous breweries in both Plzeň and České Budĕjovice. Our show at the very charming Folk Veur Volk festival up north was the last show with our then singer Cor, who left for The Caribbeans. Finding a new guy that fitted us proved hard. Though we did a Ferocious Dog support slot with him in Baroeg, Rotterdam.
2015 wasn’t a bad year for Bunch of Bastards at all. The first half of the year we played a dozen gigs, among which two in Germany and one in Belgium. No-one got hospitalized and no-one left the band, we grew a tighter unit and ended the year by starting to record an album.
Gigwise there were a number of highlights. It started with a gig celebrating Rabbie Burns day, where we shared the stage with Yorkshireman Johnny Campbell. A few weeks later, we played a the Celtic Punk Folk Festival in Stuttgart with The Moorings (France) and Paddy and the Rats (Hungary). Next day, we strolled through a garden of a monastry singing our lyrics in would-be Gregorian style. That spring BoB played support to the Scottish-Canadian folkpunk legends The Real McKenzies, were the closing act at the reknown three-day Na Fir Bolg festival, playing our first big festival tent, and played at a folk night with Drunken Dolly and Royal Spuds.
By March, John was up-and-drumming again, so BoB could have a second take-off. This happened in a new line up, with Dex taking up duties on bass. BoB played a handful of gigs around Saint Patrick’s Day. One of those saw us crossing the border into Germany, playing at a Saint Patrick’s Party of the Castellans Folk Festival folks, where Nick Parker (UK) also played. With him we jammed and drank deep into the night.
Over the summer, we played our first outdoor festivals, more gigs followed in autumn, the highlight of which was to play Fabrik in Coesfeld (Ger.), opening an Irish Folk Punk night that also included The Porters and Mr. Irish Bastard. In total, we played 17 gigs in 2014 and we added more self-penned tunes to our expanding setlist. Towards the end of the year, we had our first merch made: the t-shirts with our ‘Bunch of Bastards – Full Force Folk’ logo, still popular to this day.