Despite sailing some unexpectedly sombre seas, Float still offers a good in-your-face Celtic kick

“All the world’s a stage,” according to Shakespeare and that live Rush album of ’76, but when Flogging Molly singer-guitarist Dave King was a lad growing up in Ireland, all his living room was a stage. He didn’t have to leave his family’s two-room Dublin flat to experience the joy of live Celtic music.

“My parents were very fond of having musicians over to the house on the weekends,” recalls King, his Irish accent coming through loud and clear from an Ontario tour stop. “It was one of the only things that we had as people back then, you know. It was a very poor neighbourhood, so music was really the thing.”

Although King’s early years were rife with the sound of fiddles and mandolins at home, it wasn’t long before he developed a fondness for famed Irish rock acts like Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher, as well as the lesser-known Horslips. And by the time he was 22 he’d hooked up with former Motí¶rhead guitarist “Fast Eddie” Clarke and ex-UFO bassist Pete Way to form the hard-rock group Fastway. But 10 years after the release of Fastway’s self-titled 1983 debut album—which reached number 31 on the U.S. charts—King met his wife, Flogging Molly member Bridget Regan, in L.A., and the acoustic music of his childhood made a major comeback with him.

“We started playing music together and she was a traditional fiddle player,” he recalls, “so it kinda nailed me on the head when that happened, you know. It just seemed to grow from there.”

For the last five years King and Regan—who were married last year while on tour in Tokyo—have been living in Ireland, where they recorded the latest Flogging Molly CD, Float. On its cover the couple is pictured sitting at a table, the rest of the band gathered around, while Regan demonstrates the fine art of knocking back a Guinness. It turns out the band didn’t have to travel far for a warm one after sessions at Grouse Lodge Recording Studios in County Westmeath, because it boasted its own pub.

King claims that it was “a great bonding experience” having the pub handy, and you can clearly detect a rowdy barroom vibe on the finished product, even in seriously minded songs like the opener, “Requiem for a Dying Song”. That rousing number, which hit number 35 on the Billboard modern rock charts last year, sees King enthusiastically indulging in the popular pastime of bashing George W. Bush’s warmongering traits. Moving back from Los Angeles to the peace and tranquility of Ireland helped King put the horrors of the Iraq war in perspective.

“It’s a completely different Ireland than the Ireland that I left,” he explains. “I mean, the Ireland that I left was a very troubled country, and I believe that aspect of it has almost 100 percent disappeared. So it was just proven to me that violence and war is not the answer. Here I was sitting in the living room of our house writin’ these songs and it was peace around, whereas what happened with Iraq was basically just an excuse for the lack of focus, really. So that was really annoying me.”

Another one of Float’s most compelling songs is the title track, which takes a more sombre and ruminative approach than your typically raging Flogging Molly material. King says that “Float”—which gently meanders on a sea of jangly acoustic guitar before being tossed by emotive waves of accordion, violin, and banjo—is one of his favourite tunes on the album, although initially he had doubts about it being right for the band.

“When I started playing it in the morning I went up to Bridget and I said, ”˜Do you think this is a Flogging Molly song?’ I really didn’t know, and she said, ”˜Yeah,’ and then we went down to rehearsals and played it for the band and they loved it. So it was very experimental for us ’cause it was something like we’ve never done before, but that’s good to do. I think that’s the most important thing in any band, is to feel like you’re still going somewhere.”

Flogging Molly had been gradually gaining fans with its previous studio albums—2000’s Swagger, 2002’s Drunken Lullabies, and 2004’s Within a Mile of Home—but it really hit the popularity jackpot with Float, which entered the Billboard Top 200 chart at number four, the highest ranking by a Celtic-punk release ever. Being a regular component of the Warped Tour, the punk-oriented rock extravaganza that has been crisscrossing North America since 1995, hasn’t hurt the band’s popularity, either.

“Folk music and Irish music is punk-rock music, in my estimation,” King declares. “It’s kick-in-the-face type of music, no matter if it’s on acoustic guitar or mandolin or fiddle or whatever. And it should be! It should be soul-searching and rabble-rousing, you know, like the Dubliners.”

Flogging Molly plays the Commodore Ballroom on Thursday and Friday (October 29 and 30).