Hermitage Green’s beginnings read like a joke, and there’s something absurd about the quintet’s rapid rise to fame at home in Ireland. Who else, for instance, can claim to have been tutored in professionalism by the Pogues? Still, there’s no denying that the band has made huge strides since that day four years ago when five men walked into a bar.

As percussionist, tenor-banjo player, and singer Darragh Graham explains, Hermitage Green would see the inside of many a snug before setting foot on the concert stage.

“We started off just as a group of friends,” he explains, on the line from the Republic of Ireland’s second-largest city, Cork. “One of the lads had a brother who owned a bar, so we met up in his bar and just played away, and that’s how it started. It was just something that we all enjoyed doing—playing a little bit of music. We never intended to be a band at all.”

Fate had other plans. After a few backroom jam sessions, the five musicians were asked to play for the patrons at the front.

“And it just happened that night there was a guy in the bar who owned another bar, and he said, ‘Will you play at my bar?’ ” Graham recalls. “So we did that, started getting a regular slot, and then more and more bars just kept coming to us and asking if we’d play.

“That first gig, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing,” he continues. “It was the five of us huddled around one microphone, and we started off playing the 15 songs we knew. Then we realized we still had half an hour to play, so the last half an hour was basically the first half all over again. I remember going into that first gig thinking, ‘This is a disaster. What are we doing here?’ But I was wrong. After that, we just went from strength to strength, and it was a natural progression. We didn’t really push anything; things just fell into place.”

Along the way, Hermitage Green went from playing a crowd-pleasing, if wildly eclectic, mix of other people’s songs—Florence and the Machine, Fleet Foxes, Mumford & Sons, a smattering of Irish traditional tunes, and a Bob Marley medley—to writing its own, with most of those coming from singer-guitarist Darragh Griffin and multi-instrumentalist Dan Murphy. And the band seems bent on improving its ability to charm a crowd, as displayed to good effect on its debut full-length, Live at Whelans.

Kicking off one’s recording career with a live album is a bold move, but as Graham explains, it was also a natural one. “Basically, we’re a live band,” he says. “When we started out, we were playing five, six, seven nights a week, so that’s all we know.”

While the next album will be a studio effort, Graham and his Hermitage Green bandmates are continuing to study the art of performing, most recently as the opening act for the aforementioned Pogues.

“That was pretty wild,” he says. “They’re an amazing band, absolutely brilliant, and they’re real pros. Their show was just seamless, and we learned a lot from just watching them. Basically, they walk on-stage knowing that all the little, finer details of the show will be taken care of.”

Drinking lessons from the Pogues’ notoriously shambolic lead singer weren’t in the cards, however.

“We didn’t get to meet the infamous Shane MacGowan ourselves,” Graham admits. “He’s looked after well by his minders. But we got to meet the rest of them, and they’re really nice people.”