Andy Nolan told David Hennessy about leaving The BibleCode Sundays, his new website and his forthcoming true crime book, Green Bloods.
Andy Nolan is well known for playing accordion in the London- Irish Celtic rock band, The BibleCode Sundays but he made the decision to leave the band last year and is now launching a new website that features interviews and articles with the series being titled A Drop of the Hard Stuff and his first offering being a video interview with actor Mike Noble of This City is Ours.
In October Andy will be launching his true crime book Green Bloods, which looks at the story of Irish criminality in London, with an event at London Irish Centre.
The Irish World spoke to Andy about all the stuff he has got coming up but we had to start with his decision to leave BibleCode Sundays.
Andy told The Irish World why he made his decision to leave the band he was part of for roughly two decades.
“It was the right time for me.
“I really missed the creative side of the band. We weren’t really doing that so much anymore.
“We were really in gig mode.
“We’ve always been in gig mode.
“We’ve always been really, really busy but the creative side, the writing side of it, seemed to peter off a lot and I was missing that creativity.
“So while I was playing with the Biblecodes I was also playing with a few other bands the most recent band being Two Canoes.
“It’s Sean Gannon, the drummer from The Magic Numbers, Darren Morrissey from Morrissey and Marshall and Caroline Regan, concertina player, singer.
“We’ve started recording our own original material, written mostly by Darren and I’ve loved that.
“It’s something that I can really get my teeth into so for me, it was the right time to leave and go on to pastures new.”
Looking back what were the best gigs of your time in the band?
“Celtic Park was a big one for me.
“We played up on the pitch at Celtic Park a good few times but probably the most memorable night was when Celtic were playing Barcelona in the Champions League.
“Messi and that entire Barcelona team of the time were warming up next to us firing in shots.
“That was another massive pinch me moment and to top it off, we went to the stands that night and Celtic won 2-1, so that was huge.
“I remember thinking at the time, ‘I could literally hang up my boots now’.
“I played on the pitch at Celtic Park but there’s loads of other memories: We supported Elvis Costello at the Royal Albert Hall, that was a huge honour and that night one of his special guests was Russell Crowe.
“They’re all highlights but I guess if I had to choose one, it would be playing with Shane (MacGowan): A huge hero of mine.
“All that was beautiful memories, brilliant memories, the best memories.
“London Irish rugby club: We were like one of the resident bands down there for years.”
The BibleCode Sundays launched their first album in The Galtymore.
“We got about 1,000 people in there that night.
“The Irish scene back then was so strong.
“You’d look out into the audience and you knew everyone.
“It was a really glorious time for being an Irish band in London.”
Did you get a sense of what you as a band meant to that community?
“People were telling us all the time.
“People were always telling us, ‘You’re the anthem for our youth’.
“It did mean a lot to a lot of people.
“We wanted to try and fill that void that the Pogues had left when they went their separate ways.
“And we’d like to think that to some degree, we achieved that.
“There’s only one Pogues.
“We just felt that the Irish community in London needed a voice to be continued like the Pogues did, and we tried our best.
“The Pogues were a huge influence on us and we wanted to try and carry that on if we could, and if people thought we were worthy of doing that, it’s a big cross to carry.”
I know you have been working on it a long time, you launch your true crime book Green Bloods later this year..
“It’s been a labour of love.
“I began writing it around 2015 or ‘16.
“I’ve always been interested in the true crime genre.
“My interest began by watching films like Goodfellas, Carlito’s Way, The Godfather, The Depared, The Town.
“Then I started picking up true crime books and discovered the whole world of the Italian- American mob.
“But I discovered pretty quickly that the Irish criminals were included but they were almost like an afterthought.
“But the Irish were in America 40 years before the big first wave of Italian immigration and the Irish had already established many street gangs, powerful crime syndicates and infiltrated much of the police force, the fire department and everything else, political life in America.
“I felt that could have been researched more.
“Then I turned my eye to the Irish experience in the UK and in London and thought, ‘I’d like to tackle that’.
“I realised pretty quickly there was a story there.
“There was a strong Irish presence in the criminal underworld here in London.
“I realised there was a London Irish story here that needed to be told.
“I really wanted to blow the lid off the Irish criminal underworld here in London.
“And here we are 10 years later.
“I enjoyed every minute, that’s why the book has taken 10 years.
“I’ll be launching the book here at the London Irish Centre in October 2025.”
What characters do you deal with in the book?
“The big one at the beginning is definitely Billy Hill.
“I’ve interviewed Bobby McKew who was born in Dublin and he was the right hand man of Billy Hill.
“Billy Hill was born in Seven Dials and then his family moved up to Camden Town.
“His mum was from Dublin.
“His dad was cockney Irish and they were dirt poor, there was 15 in the Hill family and a lot of the Hill kids got into crime at a very early age.
“Billy Hill rose up through the ranks of organised crime and became the most powerful crime boss in Britain during the 60s and 70s.
“Some say he handed his empire on to the Krays when he retired.
“The Krays had Irish blood.
“They had an Irish grandmother, as did Freddie Foreman, a lot of those guys, Frankie Fraser had an Irish grandmother as well.
“It was quite common with a lot of the old cockney criminals.
“Speaking of the Krays, a lot of their criminal firm were of Irish descent, some of them were Irish born as well.
“There was a quite large influence from the Irish community in East London around that Krays’ firm.
“I explored that.
“And then we progress from the 60s up to the present day.
“I started looking at the guys in South London in the 80s and 90s.
“Bank robbery was becoming an epidemic for the Metropolitan Police and the Flying Squad and a lot of those gangs were cockney Irish, the likes of Ray Bishop, the Bradish brothers, ‘Razor’ Smith so I’ve delved into the bank robbery side of things.
“A lot of the gangs, a lot of the families that were involved in that were of Irish descent.
“I’ve gone back to the famine era as well when the early street gangs here in in the capital were recruiting poor Irish immigrants all the time because they were so desperately poor.
“They couldn’t read or write a lot of these kids, they were getting recruited into street gangs to the point where a few years down the line they were running these street gangs.
“This wasn’t just boys and men, it was the girls as well.
“Recently you’ve probably seen 1000 Blows which explores the 40 Elephants thieving gang and a lot of the heads of that gang down through the years have been cockney Irish so when people are reading the book, they’ll recognise a few names like Alice Diamond and they’ll discover that all these criminals that I’ve included are of Irish descent.
“It was important to me.
“In a way I felt like I needed to rewrite British criminal history a little bit and point people in the direction of these gangs and their ethnicity because over in this country, a lot of things is glossed over and especially when it comes to the Irish.
“I think it’s very important to realise how a lot of them were off the boat or their parents just got off the boat from Ireland and they went straight into criminality.”
Is Noel ‘Razor’ Smith, now reformed but once a notorious bank robber, in the book?
“Yeah, I first got in contact with Noel when I wrote a song called See You at the Crossroads about Razor’s life.
“I wrote to him in prison and we corresponded then while he was in prison and became very good friends when he left jail and was coming to our gigs.
“There’s a chapter on Noel ‘Razor’ Smith who was one of Britain’s most prolific bank robbers back in the 80s and 90s.
“He spent 35 years of his adult life in prison.
“His parents were from Dublin, again poor Irish immigrants who came here, initially settled in North London, then they moved down to South London and for the likes of Razor, crime just seemed to be the easiest way out of poverty.
“But he wasn’t the only one.
“There was plenty of Irish or cockney- Irish bank robbers in London in the 80s and 90s.”
Due to the spirit of the times, did a certain anti-Irish feeling play a part?
“That is an ongoing theme in the book because from the 1960s onwards, it was very commonplace to see signs in boarding houses, ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’.
“When the Irish came here initially, they weren’t made welcome so it really did push a lot of these kids, second, third generation Irish kids into crime, because they did feel like outcasts. There was prejudice.
“And then when they went into the prison system then they were dealing with ‘screws’ who were ex-military who again might have served in the north of Ireland during the 70s and 80s and had no love for the Irish so these guys were going into the British prison system here and, at the hands of these warders, were treated quite badly.
“In fact a lot of the bank robbing crews that were of Irish descent like ‘Razor’ Smith and the Bradish boys and Ray Bishop were category A prisoners along with the Irish Republican prisoners here at the time so they shared cells, they rubbed shoulders with them all the time.
“So to a large degree the Irish criminals here, albeit a lot of them had cockney accents, they felt they were lumped in with the IRA here and a lot of them became good friends and I explore that connection a lot throughout the book, how through the 70s, 80s and 90s, they were sharing cells with very dangerous paramilitaries from Ireland.”
Changing the subject back to music, you and your new group Two Canoes supported Damien Dempsey not so long ago…
“Damien’s such a good guy.
“I’ve met Damien a few times.
“The BibleCode Sundays supported Damien about 15 years ago at the Hammersmith Palais with Aslan.
“But Two Canoes, who I’m playing with now, supported Damien again at Electric Ballroom over St Patrick’s weekend.”
You have also shared the stage with a late great..
“I played with Shane MacGowan and the Popes back in 1999.
“I’ve been very, very fortunate.”
Was it a pinch me moment to play with Shane?
“Big time.
“I think the first time I actually met Shane in the flesh we were playing The Mean Fiddler in Harlesden and he came into the dressing room fashionably late, as you’d expect.
“We were supposed to go on stage about an hour beforehand but Shane came in and it was like, ‘Oh my god, there he is’.
“It was a real pinch me moment.
“It’s not often that I get star struck but Shane’s definitely one of those people that when they walk in a room, they have a presence, they have an aura and he was a huge hero of mine.
“I was sharing a dressing room with him and then 15 minutes later we’re out on stage giving it hell for leather.
“It was brilliant.”
What was it like to be part of his funeral?
“It was a huge honour to play at Shane’s funeral.
“It’s kind of hard to describe unless you were there that day.
“It felt like a gig.
“There was so much joy in that church and it was a testament to Shane and the life that he led, that people felt so comfortable and at ease to cheer, get up and dance, stand up and sing.
“The roar of the crowd that went up through the church that day when we were doing these songs, I’ll never forget it.
“It was very, very powerful.
“Shane was definitely there.
“He definitely was with us and that’s exactly what he would have wanted.”
Green Bloods is out in October and will be launched at The London Irish Center on Saturday 11 October.
Andy’s website is here.
Mike Noble (This City is Ours)’s video interview with A Drop of the Hard Stuff is available here.
