Rock Ambitions : Young Dubliners, Who Will Play O.C., Add Attitude to Irish Folk

The Young Dubliners are beginning to view themselves as a band with serious prospects in the world of rock, which partly accounts for the members’ radical break with tradition last St. Patrick’s Day.

“We did not drink all day. It was amazing,” recalls Keith Roberts, the affable, richly accented transplanted Irishman who fronts the Los Angeles band with Paul O’Toole, his songwriting partner and fellow expatriate from Dublin.

The feat of abstinence was inspired by the Young Dubliners’ heavy load of responsibilities for the day: The band had booked four shows in L.A., starting at 8 a.m. and ending long past midnight with a headlining set at the House of Blues.

“My voice was the biggest scare of all. It’s a killer” to sing that many shows in a day, Roberts said of his decision to try an unlubricated approach to St. Paddy’s revelry. “It was the first St. Patrick’s Day that, by 2:30 a.m., I was still sober as a judge.”

Quite a reversal of form for a band that, as Roberts jokingly tells it, was first inspired to take up the calling of pub musicianship in 1988 because it was “a great alleyway to free drink.”

Nowadays, the Young Dubliners (who perform today at the Virgin Megastore in Costa Mesa and at the Coach House on Thursday) are bidding for far greater rewards than a steady flow of Guinness.

Last year, the band won good notices for its first record, the EP “Rocky Road,” and it began to establish itself on the national touring circuit. Tuesday marked the release of the Dubs’ first full-length album, “Breathe.” It’s a catchy piece of mainstream electric rock, colored by such traditional Irish folk instruments as fiddle, mandolin and tin whistle, and delivered with a rousing kick.

The often bracing music powers lyrics that rise far above any cliche notions of leprechauns, shamrocks or lighthearted Irish charm and onto heavy emotional terrain where the main concern is the struggle for balance in a turbulent and trying world.

Roberts and O’Toole lead a seven-piece band that includes four Yanks and one other Dublin-bred player, bassist Bren Holmes. The two founding Young Dubliners had nothing quite so ambitious in mind back in 1988 when they first performed together--on St. Patrick’s Day--as an acoustic duo.

Speaking over the phone last week, Roberts, 30, recalled that his partnership with O’Toole began under less-than-abstemious circumstances.

“He came to a party at my house. I was already toasted, playing the guitar and singing all sorts of ridiculous songs. He arrived stone cold sober, the guitar was surgically removed from me, and he started singing all these great Christy Moore songs.”

Roberts says he was too “wasted” to remember much about the evening, but he didn’t forget the impression that O’Toole had made with his traditional Irish songs.

Roberts subsequently invited O’Toole to join him on an upcoming St. Patrick’s Day show he was planning to play with a full rock band; when the two began to harmonize, “it sounded so good in rehearsals I canned the whole rock thing. It’s such a shock, because I never had any plan for forming a duo whatsoever. Neither did he; he came here planning to be an electrician.”

Roberts had been a rocker while studying journalism at University College in Dublin. Only after meeting O’Toole here was he indoctrinated into the traditional music that they began playing in Irish bars in Los Angeles.

They played as an acoustic duo for 2 1/2 years, then began expanding bit by bit as other musicians would sit in with them and prove to be compatible both musically and--most important, in Roberts’ view--personally. “We don’t care if you’re the best fiddle player in the world. If you’re an [expletive], we don’t want you.”

Joining the three Irish members are guitarist Randy Woolford, who writes most of the songs with the band’s two founders, keyboard and saxophone player Jeff Dellisanti, drummer Jon Mattox and fiddler Chas Waltz. Waltz’s predecessor was Lovely Previn, daughter of classical conductor Andre Previn. Roberts said she left the band when conflicts arose between its touring schedule and her responsibilities as the mother of a young child.

During the early ‘90s, the Young Dubliners transformed themselves from a cover band that played music by such Celtic rockers as Hothouse Flowers (whose singer, Liam O Maonlai, was a boyhood buddy of Roberts) and the Waterboys, to a band writing its own original rock songs and working in rocked-up versions of traditional Irish music.

“We’ll always keep the Irish stuff in there,” Roberts said, “but it’s always been a big question: How much of it do you put on records? In general there’s been few bands that have made it in the states on the strength of playing Irish traditional music. We don’t want to be pigeonholed and considered a novelty act” by overplaying the Irish angle.

In choosing traditional songs for their new album, the Young Dubliners were drawn to the more ferocious strains of the Irish musical personality. “Follow Me up to Carlow,” dating from the 17th Century, and “Foggy Dew,” which recounts the 1916 rebellion that sparked Ireland’s final drive to independence, both roar with defiance for the hated British. On “Rocky Road,” an original song called “Enough Is Enough” urged an end to British rule over Northern Ireland.

Roberts said the traditional battle cry songs on “Breathe” are there primarily for their rousing, blood-pumping effect: “These songs were marching songs, about getting people hyped up to go into battle.” Roberts said he wants those fierce songs, which run counter to rock’s typical pacifism on matters of armed struggle, to be taken as reminders of a vivid past, not an incitement to further conflict in the present.

“Things are going good in Northern Ireland now” he said, referring to recent progress toward a peaceful resolution of the strife-torn region’s religious and political conflicts between Catholics and the British-backed Protestants, “and I’m not going to do anything to antagonize the situation.

“We’re saying, ‘Here’s a war song that captured the fervor and excitement of [rebel struggles in the Irish past]; let’s hope it never happens again.’ Man has an in-built savagery that is waiting under the skin to come out,” he said, “and you have to make sure it doesn’t come out.”

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A highlight of the Young Dubliners’ travels last year after the release of “Rocky Road” was a trip to Ireland last November. After playing on a nationally televised show in Dublin on a Friday night, they made their Irish debut at a club in Belfast, the main battleground in the Northern Irish “troubles.” Overtures toward a settlement had begun, Roberts said, and he was moved by the signs of peace trying to break out.

“I expected soldiers, tanks, the odd armored car, and there was nothing. The bar was full of Catholics and Protestants. Here was this total peaceful attitude. Half the band was in tears. At the end of the show I made a comment, ‘It’s amazing to be here and see no soldiers. Good luck, and [you have] our prayers for what you’re trying to do.”’

On a smaller scale, Roberts said, some of the Young Dubliners were having troubles of their own during the year leading up to the recording of “Breathe.” From them sprang the songs’ sense of urgency and personal struggle.

Roberts said his own struggles were business-related: He owned a share in Fair City, a nightclub in Santa Monica, and found that “if you’re going to run something you’ve got to be on hand, and I just wasn’t. You can’t run it by phone from a hotel room.” He said that the Young Dubliners still play regularly at the bar, now known as 2020 Wilshire, but that he no longer has an ownership interest.

“Randy Woolford had negative things happen at home last year because being away was tough” on his family situation, Roberts added. “Rather than going around moping, it seemed easier to sing about these things and put them behind you.”

The album includes such dark moments as “Don’t You Worry,” with its mysterious account of a journey from life to death, and “Mary,” in which a sympathetic, gently comforting narrator can’t stop a depressed woman from committing suicide.

For balance, Roberts notes, there is the album’s title track, which “is about the frustration and claustrophobia of life, but says that it’s better to kick back and breathe easy for a while and it’ll sort itself out.”

The Young Dubliners show they can wrest invigorating rock from harsh circumstances on “Change the World,” in which Roberts takes note of a sea of troubles then, at the climax, lets out a defiant, gumption-filled whoop.

The gruff, Pogues-like “Shame” closes the album with rollicking, rattling music as the song’s lovelorn narrator, in quintessential Irish fashion, fashions a crusty sense of humor into a bulwark against pain.

Early returns on “Breathe” have been favorable, according to Roberts. He said that Adult Album Alternative stations around the country began playing tracks from the album last week before its official release. The Young Dubliners plan to follow with a video for “Mary” (to be directed by a film-world notable whom Roberts declined to name, although Peter Bogdanovich reportedly is a big Young Dubliners fan), and to sell themselves in person with a bar-tested live act that Roberts places complete faith in.

“The radio we’re getting now, you don’t want to jinx it by celebrating, but to be added [to playlists] in places we’ve never even gotten to play is great,” he said. “You play us, we’ll come.”

* The Young Dubliners play a free acoustic show today at 7:30 p.m. at Virgin Megastore in Triangle Square, 1875A Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa. (714) 645-9906. The Young Dubliners, Lost Inasense and the Tinker’s Own play Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $13.50. (714) 496-8930.