Luke Concannon, well known for being one half of Nizlopi who are remembered for their hit JCB Song, told David Hennessy about his new album, being inspired by circumstances in Ukraine/ Russia and his time in Palestine, and taking on a young Ed Sheeran.
Luke Concannon has just released the album, Midnight Bloom.
Luke came to prominence back in the 2000s as one half of folk duo Nizlopi.
Nizlopi had chart success with their 2005 number one hit JCB Song which came close to also being Christmas number one that year.
The group would also inspire a young Ed Sheeran who they would take under their wing.
Sheeran said: “Luke Concannon is my hero; I owe a large part of my career to him.”
Luke now lives with his family in Vermont but grew up in England with grandparents from Counties Kerry and Roscommon.
Luke’s early memories are of growing up in an Anglo-Irish home and falling asleep at raucous parties filled with guitars, singing and dancing.
That sense of community has stayed with him.
After Nizlopi parted ways, Luke wrote his first solo album Give It All.
Ecstatic Bird in the Burning, Luke’s 2022 album, debuted at Number 12 in the folk charts on both sides of the Atlantic, including a Number 7 single, Doing Nothing, and garnered rave reviews.
In tracks on Midnight Bloom he deals with important and pressing themes like the Ukraine/ Russia conflict and gender inequality.
Luke chatted to us ahead of the release of the album.
You grew up with that Irish influence from your grandparents, isn’t that right?
“Yeah, there’s something very interesting about diaspora communities.
“I just felt so much more loved and at home in my grandparents’ house than often I did in a lot of other places in England growing up.
“I love the culture.
“Granddad used to say to me, ‘Luke, you know what? No matter what anyone tells you, you’re Irish’.
“We were brought up very much in that family.
“My dad’s one of six kids, all of them sang ballads, family ceili band, going back for weddings or the Willie Clancy Festival, listening to Planxty and The Bothy band and Paddy Keenan and Paul Brady so it was very much like our sense of a home culture.
“We were totally living in England and in that culture and absorbing all that too.
“What’s interesting, I think, is when you’re from two families and two cultures that are different, it gives you a bit of insight into both of them.”
Would you say your musical inclinations or love for music come from that side of the family?
“I’d say 80% or more because I grew up a lot with my Irish grandparents.
“I remember I was the smallest kid and my Nan being like, ‘Okay, now Lukey, you sing a song’.
“And then Grandad sings a song and then she’d be like, ‘I’m the judge and I say who wins.’
“And Granddad would be like, ‘I was the best, he was rubbish’.
“It was a bit of craic and she got me singing Dublin in the Rare Auld Times and Irish ballads at parties.
“I was probably eight or something and so certainly I’d put 80% of it down to growing up in that living tradition that we have.
“Not everyone has a living tradition.
“It’s particularly strong in Ireland and it’s such a privilege to be part of it.
“I remember reading a children’s book.
“Essentially the story is these big imperial colonial powers go and invade places.
“They invade and then they find out that the people they’re invading are really good fun.
“And paradoxically, when you look at all the music that’s come out of England: Lennon/ McCartney, the Gallagher Brothers, Simply Red, Shane MacGowan, Ewan McColl.
“When you look at the actual heart of English culture, it’s very much from other places.
“It came in on the Windrush with Jamaican folks.
“Then there’s UK grime and then Kneecap.
“It’s like we’re just a bunch of mongrels and we have to figure out how to get on with each other.”
That makes me think of a song off your new album, Brother which is written from the perspective of two soldiers on either side of the Russia/ Ukraine war. I was struck by the idea that had things been different they could have absolutely no problem with each other and even be mates. But then the same has been true in history and no doubt in Irish history..
“Exactly.
“If you and I were born at the wrong time, we’d be told we were enemies and to kill each other.
“And if we were born in another time, we might be best mates, like you said, and start a business or a band.
“Sometimes we’re victims of history and society and what I think art can be good at is it can transform things.
“There’s this mad story about this American soldier in the Second World War.
“One night they were in occupied France and they heard there were four snipers in the woods, German.
“Three of them got captured.
“And he goes out and he gets his trumpet out. He puts his back to a tree so he’s not going to be a target and he plays a few German tunes on the trumpet.
“He goes to bed and the next day, this German lad who’s like 19, has turned himself in to the US Air Force there and he said, ‘I heard someone playing one of our songs and I thought, What are we doing?’
“It’s mad.
“That’s what I love about music and community.”
That story about the German soldier reminded me of that famous tale about opposing soldiers putting their weapons down to play football on Christmas Day. The shame is that they went back into their trenches the next day..
“And maybe one day we’ll just keep playing football.
“Rory McLeod is a proper bard.
“And I said, ‘How do you write such great songs?’
“And he said, ‘Oh mate, just keep it simple and put yourself in someone else’s shoes’.
“And I did that with that song.
“It was surprising.
“But the chorus just erupted out.
“In the beginning the Ukrainian soldier in the first verse is like, ‘I will f**king kill you, you’re trying to destroy my home and my family. I am not holding back’.
“And then at the chorus it’s like, ‘Why are you doing this? We’re all family. What’s going on here?’
“And then the Russian’s like, ‘Well because we’re taught that you’re the Nazis and we have to liberate you’.”
You travelled to Palestine, was that inspiring?
“Yeah, it was 2009 and there were many things that were similar.
“Being in sessions in Milltown as a teenager and a young man sometimes after a ballad one of my Irish mates would say, ‘Here’s to the Palestinians because they’re getting f**ked right now’.
“And there was this sense of solidarity and a shared experience with colonialism. I found that inspiring and interesting.
“Also it’s a fascinating part of the world.
“All three monotheistic religions have come from there so I was interested to go on a pilgrimage there and be of service.
“Throughout the Middle East, I hitchhiked most of the way and people would take me in and look after me like I was a member of the family.
“It was similar to being in Kerry in the 80s where people were just so kind.
“I did some peace work in the West Bank and it just felt so good to do what I believed in.
“There was a small chance I would be shot or something while I was there but that actually made me really happy because it was doing what you care about and being all in.
“It was really beautiful to do the olive harvest with Palestinian farmers and see very indigenous vibes.
“Everyone works together on the land.
“They look after each other.
“And they’re very resilient to what’s happening there.
“I had to learn while I was there that it’s not about the goodies and the baddies like the colonisers are the bad people and the colonised the good people.
“What it’s about is, ‘How can we recover from our anger and ignorance and greed and learn how to treat each other respectfully?’
“Unfortunately there’s a lot of trauma.
“In Israel and in Jewish folks, they’ve been persecuted forever and sometimes the colonised become the coloniser.
“We’ve just got to figure out how to heal that.
“That’s where I’m at with it all.”
It’s like the message of another track on the album, Stick Together. What inspired that one?
“I think all of us feel grief at the moment.
“Some communities have been feeling grief for hundreds of years: Black folks, brown folks, folks in the north of Ireland, poor people and now I think maybe it seems like the world is on fire and falling apart and so that song is just about the fact that, ‘What does it bring up in us when we do feel like everything’s falling apart?’
“I think there’s just this hope that we could actually get together and look after each other and it’s our only hope.
“Because you can’t do anything on your own.
“We certainly can’t handle fascism, climate change and inequality on our own, on Instagram or Netflix, we have to get together.
“I’m hopeful though.
“People seem to be making choices that are more about looking after each other than fighting each other.”
A Woman is Sacred is your response to the unfair expectations put on females in the industry..
“I was writing with two amazing songwriters, Yung Cry Baby and Your Friend Juniper.
“We were just chatting at the beginning and I was like, ‘Why is it that when we put a bio out as a songwriter or as a musician, we have to look as sexy and good looking as possible?’
“And I was like, ‘Why can’t we just be authentic and just make great stuff?’
“And they were like, ‘Brother, you don’t know the half of it’.
“Cry Baby is a brown skinned lady living in America.
“She’s also a rapper as well as a songwriter and she just experiences all this pressure to be gangster and sexualised and she wants to just be a real artist.
“She wants to be an artist that has integrity and she gets a lot of pressure to market herself.
“I can’t believe it.
“We got this new album Midnight Bloom in a local record store in my hometown, Leamington Spa in England.
“It was up on the releases of the week stand or whatever and my friend sent me a photograph.
“And I looked at all the other albums and it was like Taylor Swift’s album where she’s super sexualised. It’s a recreation of that scene from Showgirls where Kyle McLachlan and the lead actress have sex in a jacuzzi.
“There was another album where there was a woman on her knees with a man holding her hair above her.
“I was like, ‘It’s 2025, why is it that the culture is still obsessed with sexualising women and showing them as dominated and subjugated by men and targets of violence? Why are we still doing that?’
“We wrote that song together and it was really magic because you can just do so much more when you collaborate.
“Collaboration can bring out the best stuff.
“I think that’s why the Beatles were so genius because however good Paul McCartney is on his own when he had his mates with him, he could just do something else.
“He’s a genius but it was like genius x 1000 when they’re all together.
“So writing together with those two, it just flowed out.
“I sent it to a mentor the other day, an amazing woman, and she said, ‘I’m in floods of tears listening to this song and I want every man, woman and child in the world to hear this song’.
“Because so many women have this experience of being invaded, of being pushed, of having a lot of desire placed on them rather than kindness.
“There’s that line, ‘I want your kind words, not your desire. If I turn and say, ‘Please don’t’, will it fuel the fire?’
“I’m just committing to hold myself and other men to a different standard because we want a safe world for women.
“It’s hard to have the conversations because people often laugh at you or say, ‘Oh, you’re being too sensitive’.
“But we can’t keep going on the way we’re going.
“There’s just this conditioning for generations where men can feel so entitled and where women feel like they have to make themselves small or look after men rather than be empowered.
“We need women’s leadership.”
Of course your track JCB Song is well known. The story about you and your father in his JCB evokes memories of fathers for many people..
“Yeah, we get an email every three months or so saying, ‘This is my dad’s favourite song, can we play it at his funeral?’
“Or, ‘This makes us think of our dad, can we play it at his funeral?’
“The thing is men are really good.
“It’s always going on about toxic men.
“Men are being held accountable and we need to remember that men are doing our best.
“My dad was and is a great dad.
“He was just great fun and he embodied some things that my mum couldn’t and it’s all in that song.
“And I think all of us who have been lucky enough to have a dad or a father figure know those qualities and so we have just got to figure out how to kind of heal because there’s just this crisis amongst men.
“Men commit suicide four times more than women, much more likely to be addicts, much more likely to be lonely.
“Sure, there’s toxic masculinity and how can we help say, ‘No, you can’t act out badly’.
“But also, ‘How can we look after each other so that we can recover?’
“Because we need men and that song and the responses to it shows that we need the sort of energy, the craic, the warriorship, the whatever it is.”
Did you know what you had when you wrote that song? That it would have chart success and that it would still strike a chord almost two decades later?
“I interviewed Declan O’Rourke last year and he was like, ‘When I wrote Poor Boy’s Shoes, it’s like when you pull the slot machine lever and the three watermelons come up: Bing, bing, bing’.
“Sometimes you hit gold.
“And I definitely got that excitement and feeling.
“It just flowed.
“And I’ve probably had that feeling and experience with maybe six or seven songs in my lifetime.
“And the truth is for it to be heard, you need all these other elements.
“We released JCB Song in the June of 2005 and it sold 600 copies.
“But then it sort of started going viral.
“We started getting press, radio, things started to blow up.
“We re-released it and it sold 600,000 copies.
“So sometimes people are saying to me, ‘I’m no good. My songs haven’t become big’.
“And it’s like, ‘No, you’ve almost definitely got some hit songs there but you just haven’t got the other elements of the right PR, the right story, the live gigs that are really kicking off. You need all these things to make a JCB Song happen’.
“I knew I had something but you need the other parts to make it reach other people.”
Before you go what was it like to take a young Ed Sheeran on board?
“He’s always had this wonderful buzzy intensity and enthusiasm.
“I really wanted to mentor him and look out for him more and I just got burnt out and didn’t, so I feel sad about that but fair play to him.
“We’re still in touch, we’re still doing stuff together.”
Midnight Bloom is out now.
For more information, click here.