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Although Mal Touhy, lead singer of The Riptide Movement, grew up in Lucan, Dublin, Roscommon actually had a big influence on his early musical life. His parents are Rossies you see, and of course, they frequently had visitors in the capital from their native county.
“Both their families would be into singing and music. A lot of my aunties and uncles, when they’d finished school, they’d be on their way to the UK or America to emmigrate. Before they did, they’d always stop in Dublin and work with my dad for a month or so to build up the money to go,” Mal recalls.
“So there’d always be sessions in the house and we always had to sing a song, recite a poem or do something to add to the party.”
By the age of 14, Mal was playing and singing in bands, so music has been always been a huge part of his life. Alongside his bandmates Gar Byrne, Jay Dalton and Gerry McGarry, Mal formed The Riptide Movement in 2006.
Mal had just returned from a year living in Australia, and says if he was going to invest so much time in the band, he wanted to be able to make a career out of it.
And, so he and the lads have!
It was like everything came together at once
Speaking about the most memorable gig they have done, Mal muses over playing with Neil Young and The Rolling Stones, but in the end decides that playing the mainstage at Electric Picnic in 2015 was when the hard work all paid off.
“It was like everything came together at once, everything we were working for and building towards as a band. We brought out our big album Getting Through in 2014. It was just a stunning day, we’d a great slot. We were on at about five on the Saturday afternoon.
“The whole mainstage area was full of people because the weather was beautiful. Everybody knew our songs, because All Works Out had been out a year at that stage and the album had gone to number one. It was a really big time for the band. It felt like it all came together at that gig.”
Getting started
Getting to that point of musical success wasn’t easy, however. When the band’s first album What About the Tip Jars? came out in 2009. They ordered 10,000 copies on CD, but things didn’t quite go to plan.
“We thought the album was going to be massive, we thought there would be queues outside the record stores and all. We were very ambitious and a little bit naïve. So we had these 10,000 CDs. When we released it, I think we sold 1,000 because it did alright in the charts.
“But Irish radio weren’t really into it and we weren’t really getting much media coverage. So they were all in our houses, blocking up our bedrooms, under our beds.”
We’d have our guitar case out with all our CDs. We learned pretty quickly after a couple of weeks what songs people were vibing off
The answer to the CD conundrum came to two of the band members, Gerry and Gar, when they were walking down Grafton St in Dublin one day. They saw a band busking, surrounded by a crowd and selling plenty of CDs. So they decided to give it a go themselves.
“We went out and started busking,” Mal says. “We’d have our guitar case out with all our CDs. We learned pretty quickly after a couple of weeks what songs people were vibing off. We ended up moving all those CDs in a year.
“It was a great way of honing our skills to play live, because people wouldn’t stop unless you were putting on a good show. It was a great learning curve.”
Refining their live music skills was, of course, very useful. At the moment, like many others, they’re missing live gigs. But Mal says they’ve all been using the time to write individually, and are looking forward to when they can come together again to create music.
We’d get a house on Airbnb in a place like Kerry or Wicklow, where you have a bit of space and you can make as much noise as you want
They’ve just released a new single Fall a Little More in Love. Originally, they were going to put it out next year, but felt now more than ever was the right time for an upbeat song like this, to lift people’s spirits.
Normally, pre-pandemic, when writing music for an album or EP, the band go off to remote locations to bash out ideas, choose the songs and record.
“We’d get a house on Airbnb in a place like Kerry or Wicklow, where you have a bit of space and you can make as much noise as you want. Everybody is coming to the plate with a few ideas and everyone gets collectively immersed in the music. You wouldn’t have the distractions of day-to-day life and it really works for the recording process,” Mal explains.
Next year, the band will be together 15 years and Mal says they are planning to release something special. What that is exactly, he’s staying shtum. Until then, watch this space!
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