THE IRISH ROVERS
Where: McPherson Playhouse, 3 Centennial Sq.
When: Friday, April 14, 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: Sold out
In 2015, the end was near for The Irish Rovers. Now, there’s no end in sight for the band.
The group responsible for The Unicorn, Wasn’t That a Party and Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer is celebrating its 60th year as a group with a two-month tour that winds down Friday at the McPherson Playhouse. The show, like almost every stop that preceded it, is sold out. Singer and co-founder George Millar, 76, is amazed at the turn of the events, having told the sa国际传媒 in 2015 that this type of touring was soon to be a thing of the past.
“All of these young people are now coming out to our concerts,” Millar said during an interview this week. “It’s like it was 40 years ago, and I’m thinking, ‘My god, I’m never going to be able to retire.’ But while the people still want us, why not do it?”
Following the band’s date in Victoria on Friday, Millar and a few members will travel to Nanaimo for a recording session with producer Rick Salt, who has handled many of the band’s recordings over the past 30 years. The band’s last album earned The Irish Rovers a Canadian Folk Music Awards nomination for song of the year.
“We’re keeping busy,” Miller said, “We’ve been doing this for 60 years, and I don’t know if it gets any easier, but it seems to work.”
Members are based in Ireland, Montreal, Vancouver and Florida at the moment. Millar resides in Victoria but keeps a home in his native Northern Ireland, where he and brother Will Millar — more on him later — were born. The Millars emigrated to Toronto with their family in 1953, and in 1963, with the late Jimmy Ferguson, formed The Irish Rovers in Calgary.
Millar, now the lone original member, leads a version of the group that has a fleeting family connection (Ian Millar, who shares lead vocal duties, is George’s cousin) but retains the free-spirit fun of the original lineup. It helps that there has been a resurgence in Celtic music, thanks to the re-popularization of traditional sea shanties through social media. To Millar’s delight, The Irish Rovers have been swept along in the craze known as “ShantyTok,” for its popularity on the TikTok app.
Nathan Evans, a young Scottish singer, had a huge hit with The Wellerman in 2020, eventually topping the charts in nine countries. The traditional song, whose roots in the public domain date back to the 19th Century, has been covered countless times over the years, including by The Irish Rovers in 1977 and 2022, on the band’s last album, No End in Sight.
The Celtic resurgence led to renewed interest in The Irish Rovers online, a late-stage spike Millar said he could have never predicted. He gave up up trying to chase trends decades ago.
“Who could have predicted The Unicorn?” Millar said of the band’s signature hit, which cracked the U.S. Top 10 in 1968. “I don’t believe it when anybody says, ‘This is going to be a hit.’ Nobody knows, it doesn’t matter what it is. If you’re The Beatles, you could predict a song was going to be No. 1. but other than that, you don’t ever know.”
Millar credits stepdancer Michael Flatley and the cast of Riverdance for the original Celtic revival. Before the Irish song-and-dance showcase reached maximum exposure in the 1990s, the traditional music of Scotland and Ireland was largely kept to the fringes of the music industry, despite its chart dominance during the 1960s and ’70s.
“That really got young people involved,” Millar said of Riverdance. “Before that, Celtic music was maybe just us, The Clancy Brothers and The Chieftains.”
Touring for The Irish Rovers will slow down eventually. Millar is 76, and though he’s in good health, “it’s really difficult to fly around,” he said. The nature of the group has changed, too. Several longtime members have died, and his brother, Will Millar, has not been a member of the group since 1995. The brothers have recently reconciled, Millar said, after years of not speaking.
“He and I are talking again,” George Millar said. “We had a falling out, as brothers tend to do, but we are now laughing at each other and saying, ‘Why were we fighting?’ ”
This news is liable to send longtime fans scurrying for further information on the topic, once it has been made public, but George Millar is tempering expectations. A bout with cancer has made singing an issue for Will Millar, so a long-awaited reunion is not possible.
“Even if he could sing, I would doubt very much that he would want to travel. Having said that, he still plays the tin whistle and mandolin, so there’s no reason he couldn’t come to Nanaimo and put some stuff on our new CD.”
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