We chat to Cliffords ahead of their Bodega headline show

Hi Iona - where are you speaking to me from today?

Well we're in Cork shooting content today, but I'm in the most Cork kind of place to be, on top of Patrick’s Hill. It’s a lovely day today. It’s a big hill where you can see all the city; it’s quite beautiful.

And you’ll be coming to Nottingham very soon! How are you feeling about the tour coming up?

Yes, the tour starts on 12th, and we’re in Nottingham on 16th… I’m so excited! We’re just back from a mini-tour of Australia, and that was our first ever tour. So we really learned a lot of lessons and it really instilled us with… that this is really something we want to do, and we're really excited. We've been in rehearsals for the past two weeks, which has been unbelievable. 

It's just nice to have a bit of down time as well, practising, but it's nice to have something to look forward to. It's such a privilege to get to see places we've never been before, to play shows and get to meet new people. 

I love the way you casually dropped in that your first ever tour was in Australia. How did that come about? 

I know – we’ve never done an Irish tour! We ended up playing a festival with Dermot Kennedy. He made this festival called Misneach, which is an Irish festival in Australia; so obviously half of Ireland’s in Australia right now! It was St. Patrick's Day and it was mad: 15,000 pasty Irish people getting really sunburnt. And because we didn't want to fly all that way just to do one show – it would have been a bit silly – so we did a Sydney show and a Melbourne show. It was just mental. I didn't think anyone was going to be there, and there were great crowds at both shows. And not even crowds of people who were just going to see shows, but some people who actually knew the music, which blew me away.

It was surreal and I kind of felt people were lying to me. I’ve got a really bad habit of doing that. It’s happened to me once before. We were in England, in Kent in a bar somewhere, and someone came up to us and asked if we were Irish. We said “Yeah, we’re in a band,” and he said “Are you Cliffords? I love your stuff.”

I was like, “Stop lying to me!” But he was being sincere.

Your band isn’t new as such, but you’ve quite suddenly appeared more widely. It feels like a breaking through kind of moment. Does it feel that way to you?

Yeah, it's weird, ‘cause I think to people outside of Ireland – or maybe people outside of Cork especially – maybe it feels like that but to us we've been playing the Cork scene for two or three years now, quite consistently, so it's not this feeling everything's happening overnight. It's a feeling that we've put a lot of a lot of work in and that recognition is coming. 

When we started getting recognized in the UK, it was for an EP that we'd released six months previous. When it was originally released, no one listened to it at all, and then it just took one person to listen to it and it just went crazy. It's great to be reaching a wider audience, but I think it would be a lot scarier if we were a brand new band and we had to learn to play shows. The good thing is that we've done a lot of practice in grassroots venues.

What did you learn from the Australian experience about touring?

I mean I definitely should have packed better… and drank less on Saint Patrick's Day! I think practising a full show – almost choreographing a full show and how that works out – is something that we're bringing to these new shows.

We had such a lovely team with us in Australia and they just helped everything run really smoothly. So just getting up early and getting to see the city that you're in and having a really well polished show that you know what's going to happen … and not being really hung over is my plan for this tour!

As a band, have you developed any pre-gig rituals or ways of preparing?

We meditate together in a circle, which is nice. We all do deep breaths and I tell them affirmations – they're all good boys and we're all going to do really well. And then we sing that song “You take the high road and I'll take the low road, and I'll be in Scotland before you”. We do this before every show… and it’s really awkward now we’ve got session drummers, sometimes a new drummer for every show – and they just stand there.

Then it’s stressful sometimes – what we found last year when we did one or two festivals is you don't get that time. We usually do it in the Green Room and we've become quite reliant on it to have a good show. Sometimes we're rushed on stage, so we're kind of doing it half on stage. But it’s nice; I think it's just getting everyone together on the same buzz before a show.

Your Nottingham venue is The Bodega – I’m not sure what the Green Room facility is like there for the meditation…

That’s all right, we’ll take anywhere!

I can’t wait for it. If we didn’t do tours like this, I wouldn’t necessarily get to go to Nottingham, so it's such a nice thing that I'm going to get to see a city or a place that I would never have gone to. I'm really excited about it! 

The crowds are usually great in Nottingham…

If they’re not, I'll talk to you about that… Phil told me they’re meant to be good craic and it’s s**t, what’s going on?!

I think my favourite ever show at The Bodega was SPRINTS last year - fellow countrymen. There seems to have been a bit of a surge here in the UK of Irish bands breaking through. Has it helped you in some way to be able to be part of that wave?

It has. It’s a bit of a tough one – there’s a lot of this narrative of Irish bands being so cool right now. But I think Ireland has always had such a huge music scene, and we’ve seen that in our city. When we were starting gigs, the people that we were looking up to were the bands in Cork. They weren't the big bands. I think that spotlight on Ireland does help, but I think it can also put people all into one category. It's great that we're getting more recognition, but, you know, we should be looking more at the individual bands. SPRINTS are huge for us, and Soda Blonde is a band I'm obsessed with. And it is great to see people being able to make their careers take their music wherever. 

I do get a bit sick of “she’s the new Dolores O’Riordan” just because I’m an Irish woman in a band with men it seems. But as long as people are enjoying the music, and as long as people are enjoying Irish music, we're all happy then.

You mentioned your EP (Strawberry Scented) which has actually been out a while [released in April 2024]. How does it feel singing those songs now, in a very different space from where you wrote them?

I think there's something lovely about that. It’s like reading back your diary, you know? Those were songs I wrote when I was 17, 18. Some of them I wrote when I was younger, some of them I wrote when I was older. Even though I might not relate to them now, that still is me. That still is a part of me; that is how I felt at one time of my life, and that will always be. You can't shy away from that, you can't be embarrassed at that. I think it shows growth. 

I'm obsessed with songwriting and the process of songwriting… I love seeing development from the first EP now, and I still love singing the sounds. I think Feels Like a Man is probably my favourite song I've ever written… I just love it. 

And actually, I really love it when artists I love write bad albums. It just gives me a bit of hope, that you  can write good songs and bad songs and it's all a part of the creative process. I don't find an artist as interesting if they’ve only got 100% great songs. It doesn’t represent the journey I suppose.

Cliffords perform at The Bodega on 16th April 2025.

@cliffordsband