Joe McCormack of The Peppered Aces spoke to David Hennessy about the band’s new music ahead of their playing at the London St Patrick’s celebration this Sunday.
The Peppered Aces are a band that has been long on the Irish scene in London.
They have been a regular fixture on the scene for almost ten years.
Well known for playing covers, they have just surprised a few people by releasing their first ever original music, launching their debut single Howlin’ at the Moon at the Claddagh Ring last month.
Releasing their own music was actually the band’s reaction to being the victims of an ‘opportunist’, but a low point for the band was the ‘catalyst’ for their new direction.
The Peppered Aces will join Kila, Irish Women in Harmony and more when they play in Trafalgar Square this Sunday for the Mayor’s St Patrick’s Day concert. They also play the after party at The Steel Yard which also features Hungry Grass and The Commons.
The band hope for more of these shows in the future as they look to release more original music and play more festivals as they prepare to celebrate ten years as a band next year.
The Peppered Aces are made up of Joe McCormack (guitar and vocals), Ronan Caheny (lead guitar) and Patrick Kilbane (fiddle).
Joe (39) is from Portarlington, Co. Laois, Ronan comes from Enniscrone, Co. Sligo and Patrick was born in the UK and did much of his growing up in Cleveland, USA.
The Irish World caught up with lead singer and guitarist Joe McCormack ahead of this weekend’s big show.
Let’s talk about the new single, Howlin’ at the Moon. You’ve been a band for a long time but doing your own music is a newer thing, isn’t it?
“Yeah, we formed in 2016.
“Funny enough St Patrick’s Day 2016 was our first ever gig and we have been kind of doing the scene around northwest London.
“It was just myself and Ronan when we started and then Patrick joined, he just kicked us on a lot of gears really, because his style and what he brings with his fiddle playing, there was really another dynamic to the way we were sounding.
“He’s almost like a lead guitar player with a fiddle if that makes sense.
“When he joined, it really kicked us on a bit because it opened us up to covering much more material and we took a couple of trips abroad to do some gigging abroad.
“We’ve been growing in terms of the venues that we’re playing at, particularly over the last few years.
“We were getting a bit more established at what we were doing and particularly last year was very, very busy.
“And then we finished up 2024 at the Claddagh Ring actually and half two, quarter to three in the morning, we’re loading our gear and some opportunist decides to jump into our van and drive off with all our equipment.
“We probably had about half of our equipment in the van and he just took off with the van as well, so we lost about £6,000 pounds worth of equipment.
“It was that point really that we were thinking, ‘Well, we have to book loads of gigs to try and get some money back in to buy this stuff again’.
“And we just stopped for a second and thought, ‘Actually, do we really want to be just rolling out the same old thing we have the last few years?’
“We had been messing around a little bit with our own music and we just used the opportunity.
“It was like turning a negative on its head.
“It was a response to it all without telling everyone, ‘Oh, poor me. We lost all our gear’.
“We just said, ‘We’re not going to advertise that too much’.
“People were trying to convince us to do GoFundMe and ask people for sponsorship, we just didn’t feel that we wanted to do that.
“We’ve often, obviously, got involved with GoFundMe events and they’re normally for sick people and people who really have been afflicted by something.
“Although we were rinsed dry, we were just going to use this time just to start writing our own stuff.
“We got Howlin’ at the Moon together quite quick.
“We pulled the recording together and that was our first time to explore how you distribute your music and how you do all that so we really learned a lot.
“From fully writing the song to getting it out on Spotify, it was a month.
“Writing, recording and distributing was a month.
“We were really shocked, actually, that we were able to pull it together.
“We had a launch night for it at the Claddagh Ring on 1 February and it went very well, well received.
“I guess people are still scratching their heads, ‘Where has this come out of The Peppered Aces because they’ve always just ever been a covers band?’
“We just feel as well, ‘If we don’t do it now, when are we ever going to do it?’
“St Patrick’s Day 2026 will be our tenth anniversary so we’re trying to get something together to mark that milestone and we have, obviously, our current song.
“We’re looking to get maybe an EP released in the lead up to St Patrick’s Day 2026, get it out there and see where it goes: If people like it, if we’re relevant and able to compete with all of the other chancers out there.”
Losing your gear very early on 1 January to launching the song on 1 February really was a quick turnaround..
“Yeah, I mean, we just never even contemplated we’d be able to do it because we’ve had really bad experiences with recording.
“About two years ago, we got onto this recording studio.
“I can’t remember the name of it but we paid them.
“We had to pay them up front.
“It was a couple of thousand we had to pay them and we had done the recordings.
“We just didn’t know that their plan was to close down the studio the very minute we finished so we never actually got one bit of material we could use from it.
“We had just wasted so much money so we feel like we’ve had a couple of bad luck experiences.
“January was quite productive to get that single out.
“We have two or three more on the go at the moment that we’re working through but we’re just looking to take a break from the scene really, to give ourselves a break as well because you’re working five days a week, you’re gigging three nights a week. It just takes its toll.”
You’ve got Trafalgar Square on 16 March, that’s a big crowd to play Howlin’ at the Moon for…
“It is, yeah.
“We’ve been looking at people like us doing that gig for the last number of years and we were kind of, ‘Why aren’t we getting that shot? What’s wrong with us?’
“And I guess what we’ve done really poorly is PR.
“I’m not surprised we weren’t getting calls about stuff like this because although we’re known on the pub venue scene, we were not necessarily putting ourselves out there to be picked up for festivals and bigger events that we think we’re able to do.
“It’s not happening for us but I think we’re hoping it will now.
“It particularly makes our band a bit more interesting that we’re doing our own thing and we will be looking to seize those opportunities going forward.
“I have been trying to get in touch with some of the festivals that we see happening.
“We’re grateful (to the pubs) over the years.
“We’ve done quite well out of it but it’s just time for a bit of a change, I think.”
Let’s talk about your inspirations for the music. Howlin’ at the Moon seems to have a real Pogues feel. Am I right in saying that? Who else are you inspired by?
“The Pogues are definitely an influence.
“We’ve covered lots of their stuff over the years.
“Since Shane passed away we’ve done a couple of nights in tribute of him at the London Irish Centre with the Biblecodes and the Monday club and Imelda May.
“We’ve done one or two of those nights and it kind of encouraged us to start listening to them again.
“We’re quite big fans of music by The Scratch and The Mary Wallopers.
“We kind of draw a lot of comparisons to the likes of the Mary Wallopers because they’re out there doing covers essentially.
“They’re picking up really old Irish songs and they’re putting their own take on it like what we do with our covers.
“We’ve never just taken a song and put it out the way you’ve heard it from the original artist.
“We try and kind of chop and change it.
“I spoke one time to Steve Lillywhite (famed record producer who has worked with U2, The Pogues and many more) and he gave me a bit of advice.
“He said, ‘If you’re ever doing a cover, cut the head off the song, chop the arms off, cut the legs off, play the song, put it all back together the way you would and see, does it work?’
“We always try and do that because it’s just a bit boring putting it out the way it’s been put out by somebody else.”
Obviously it was horrible what happened with your van but if it has led to you doing your own music, could it even be a good thing, a blessing in disguise or is it too soon to say such a thing?
“It’s maybe a bit too soon to say that but we have obviously alluded to that before because it was definitely the catalyst behind us saying, ‘We’re a bit tired of doing the same thing. The gear is gone, let’s just look at what we’re doing ourselves that we’ve discussed and kind of kind of flirted with before, but never quite executed it’.
“We had the bones of a song somewhere and we just sort of pulled it together.
“That song kind of worked out.
“It’s definitely put a fire under us again to look at where this could go.”
Do you still have that sense of you should have taken this path sooner?
“Yeah, absolutely.
“We don’t look too negatively in retrospect.
“We’re always looking forward.
“I think we’ve cut our teeth on the gigging side of things so we’re well able to get up there and play a gig.
“I suppose we all came into it quite from different backgrounds.
“I’m actually a drummer and played drums in Ireland for the guts of 10 years with different cover bands.
“When I moved to London 11 years ago, I was living in accommodation that just did not allow for a drum kit so I had to pick up a guitar.
“So now I really kind of sit in the middle of the band the lead singer, if you want to call it that, and I play rhythm guitar.
“And it’s taken me a while- I’m not sure it should have taken nine years of being in The Peppered Aces to feel comfortable about doing that rather than being behind a drum kit because that took time for me and I’m still learning but the other two guys are quite a lot more established on their instruments, particularly Patrick on the fiddle.
“He just landed on the doorstep of us really.
“We just took him.
“We snatched him actually because he would have been taken very quickly by someone else but his ability on the fiddle is just something that we’re always in awe of really.
“When he joined, it just really changed us.
“That just opened us up to a whole different world of possibility really in the music that we cover.
“But, as I said, we don’t look back too much.
“We know that we should have done more, we know that we should have been taking advantage of time, particularly COVID.
“We should have been doing more around COVID.
“(But) we were all key workers at the time.
“We hadn’t got the time off that other people may have had sitting at home.
“But there was opportunities we missed, for sure.
“But look, as I said, we don’t look back with too much negativity about what we could have done.
“We’re doing it now and that’s it.
“We definitely said, ‘If we don’t do it now…’
“There’s definitely opportunity for us to pull back a bit (from the gigs).
“That hopefully will give us a bit more time to explore this world of original music.”
As you said, it will be a big anniversary for you next year…
“Yeah, we traditionally, particularly before COVID, used to go to America around that time and gig over there.
“New York was really where we went.
“The last time we were there was March 2020.
“I’ll never forget it.
“We had organised probably our biggest stretch of gigs over the course of the Saint Patrick’s festival.
“We had, I think, 10 gigs booked in over seven or eight days.
“There was a lot of talk about COVID and countries shutting borders and all this.
“I guess everyone was still learning about it at that point but they were aware of it.
“We heard about two days before we left to go out that the St Patrick’s Parade was off in New York.
“So we were like, ‘Oh God, are we going to be okay?’
“So I rang all of the venues and said, ‘Look, is everything okay over there? What’s happening?’
“’Oh, yeah, come on, come on, come on’.
“I remember we landed JFK, phones on, open my phone: Cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel.
“We had literally flown over for no reason.
“We did one gig out there of the ten, but we had a great time anyway.
“And then we had to hightail it out of there two days early because they were going to shut the borders.”
If you did just the one gig, was it a good gig?
“It was great.
“I think the people that were there couldn’t believe that there was such an event happening because Trump was just on the news shooting down everything.
“We ran the event.
“We probably shouldn’t have, technically, but we did anyway and there was lots of people there.
“I think they were looking at it like, ‘This is the last thing that we’re going to see before everything really shuts down and we’re going to be locked away in the house for however long’.
“One of the other highlights for us was going back to Ireland a few years ago.
“We did a little tour of Ireland and there are so many bands covering the same material as we are.
“It’s a bit more of an oddity thing over here, we can get away with it more over here but we did go back to Ireland and we just sort of tested the water in terms of, ‘Are we as good as bands doing something similar to us over there?’
“It really went well.
“It went really, really well so we’ll be looking forward to going back to Ireland again to maybe do a bit more over there, but we’re going to stay put across here for a moment and continue on this musical journey of our own stuff, see where it takes us and then maybe go back over there with something to offer.
“I think we’re saying about the 10 years next year, we would like to have a product ready to go.
“We always fancied going back to America maybe for our 10 year anniversary, make a big trip of it.
“Perhaps it will be in Ireland, not sure but we’re definitely going to mark it somehow but we need to get working this year.
“We need to have something that we can say, ‘This is us after 10 years’.”
Howlin’ at the Moon is out now.
The Peppered Aces play the Mayor’s St Patrick’s Day concert in Trafalgar Square this Sunday 16 March and the after party at the steel yard, 13- 16 Allhallows Lane EC4R 3UE.
For more information, click here.
