The Georgia Straight is a proud media sponsor of CelticFest. 

If you’re sitting in a pub in Tullamore, you might just run into one of Ireland’s buzziest pop acts working on its next big thing. 

“Every few months, we have a traditional Irish session in one of the pubs where we’re from—Tullamore, County Offaly,” says Jonathan Byrne, better known as Bee, and one of the three members of trad house trailblazers Chasing Abbey. “We always take one song from each night that went down really well, that lifted the energy in the room…and we usually try it the next day in the studio.”

Chasing Abbey—the three-piece of Ronan Bell (Ro), Ted Conway (TeddyC), and Jonathan Byrne (Bee)—has been making waves in its home country by fusing upbeat dance with classic Irish instruments. All three musicians grew up playing banjo in traditional Irish bands, and the trio spent several years “gigging around many, many pubs” before deciding to shift into more techno territory. 

“We actually love dance music, rap music—that’s all the music we listened to with our friends,” Byrne offers. “We want to make music we can actually play to our friends that they’d actually listen to, so we invested some money into electronic gear, and we got into making dance music.”

The band’s debut single, “That Good Thing”, scooped the prestigious public-voted prize for Irish Song of the Year in 2017. But that was back when the group was still focused on a more rap- and hip-hop-tinged version of its sound. 

The big sonic shift came—like so much musical reinvention of the 2020s—around when Covid happened. 

“After that, we went back to our roots, because we had nothing else going on at home. We started playing traditional Irish music again,” Byrne recalls. “We combined both of them together, and that’s kind of what we’re doing now.” 

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Some people were skeptical of Chasing Abbey’s musical bonafides, or wondered whether leaning into their Irish culture was simply a marketing ploy.

“We’re probably known for more contemporary dance music—our first six or seven songs were mainly dance radio music,” Byrne says. “It was definitely a bit of a shock for some people when we came out with the more trad-influenced stuff. A lot of people were calling us fakes because they didn’t know our background.” 

While celtic punk has a strong tradition—think Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys integrating folk rage and mandolin into electrifying live shows—there’s less crossover with more electronic, contemporary genres. 

To Byrne, that’s something of a missed opportunity. Whether it’s a ceilidh or a rave, the music has to drive the movement; what good is a dance track unless it gets you on your feet?

“Irish music is so free, and the melodies are so, so pleasing, and that’s kind of what drags us back to it each time—and the energy offered as well,” he explains. “It’s very like dance music, because the goal of most Irish music is to get people up and dancing, and that’s the same with house music.” 

With multiple number-one hits on the Irish charts, the band really broke out with last year’s “Oh My Johnny”—a driving beat overlaid with frenetic synths, twanging banjo, and lyrics adapted from the classic Irish folk song “Banks of the Roses.” (Ro, as both “the best banjo player” and “a sore loser,” is the one who takes on solo duties for the live shows.)

And, like many of those recent trad house tracks, the song had its genesis in those pub jam sessions. 

“We’re not plugged in or anything—we’re just sitting in the corner, and we invite friends and family, and we test out what way the room reacts to certain songs,” Byrne elaborates. “It’s very impromptu.”

While the huge success of “Oh My Johnny” led Chasing Abbey to ever-greater heights—from being certified platinum, to playing on flagship Irish talk show The Late Late Show, to getting signed with Warner and Spinnin’ Records for global releases—the band’s heart remains in Tullamore.   

“We’re trying to create a world where we can release a song that’s very dancey, and then also a song that has dance and trad in it,” Byrne concludes. “We want to try and be able to do both.”  

The three-piece isn’t chasing anyone else’s sound. They just want you to get up and dance.

Chasing Abbey is headlining CelticFest’s free live concert at the Vancouver Art Gallery North Plaza on March 16 at 8:20pm. See the full schedule here.