Fourth Time’s The Charm For Dublin’s The Coronas Who Are Returning To Australia This November

In 2025, fourth time’s the charm for Dublin’s The Coronas, with the beloved rock trio set to return down under for a fourth year in a row this November. Gearing up to visit Melbourne, Sydney and Perth later this year, prepare to once again fall head-over-heels with the energetic and magnetic stylings of The Coronas in a live setting, with plenty of new and old favourites in store. Danny O’Reilly talks to Hi Fi Way about their upcoming tour and what’s in store.

Four years in a row, you must love it here?
We do, especially at that time of year as well. November. We’ve got it down to a T. Now, going really breaks up the winter back here. It’s getting so miserable and cold in November, and we love going to Australia that time of year, and the crowds have thankfully been growing as well. So, it’s it’s it’s an exciting time. It’s cool.

Three shows in three days, that’s a pretty tough ask, and then flying Sydney to Perth. That must be a tough way to finish the tour?
Yeah, it is. But listen, we love it, it’s funny, people say that to me, God, that must be tough, and it is. But we’re there for such a short period of time. We don’t even try and beat the jet lag. You just go with it, and you can sleep whenever, you can get a couple of hours sleep here and there, and the adrenaline gets you through, and because the shows are good, people go, oh, travelling must be tough, and touring must be tough.

As long as the shows are going well, everything is easier, we love it so much, and we don’t mind the travelling. We’ll get into Melbourne a couple of days before the first show, and have a couple of days to chill, and then we’ll have a day or two in Perth at the end as well. So yeah, we’ll make a week out of it at least. But yeah, it is tough work, the three in three days. But you know it’s okay. I got to mind myself the first night or two, and then I can have a beer on the final night, I’d say.

Absolutely, couldn’t fit Adelaide in this time?
No, unfortunately, no, not this time. We only have a small window for the space of the tour, and it tends to be weekends that the promoter is trying to find dates for. Not this time and you’re not the first interviewer that has shown some annoyance that we haven’t got to Adelaide, but we played there once before. It’s such a cool city. I really like it, and hopefully we can make it work that we can get back there. You know the shows in Melbourne and Sydney and Perth have been growing so hopefully we can do it, maybe next time where we can make it to Adelaide.

Have you put the call out to all the expats that you are coming to Australia?
Absolutely, it just seems to be growing and growing over there. The numbers we had last November, like in Sydney especially. There were so many Irish people it was crazy, and I think the Aussies at the show were like looking going, “What the hell is going on here? Where did all these come from?” And you know, the further they get away from home, the more Irish they feel like. If we do a show in Dublin, there won’t be an Irish flag in the crowd. But if we do a show in Sydney there’s Irish flags, and there’s people requesting old Irish songs and our more traditional stuff. So, I think people want a piece of home the further they get away from home. We’re happy to be a part of that for people and our shows are definitely a feel-good vibe, good time and positive vibes.

Is that what makes the difference when you come to Australia that it almost feels like an extension of being at home?
Definitely! I think Ireland and Australia have a lot of similarities, both as people, like to have a good time. We love our music, we love our arts, and I think it’s one of the reasons that Australia has been a good territory for us to tour. We’re at a great stage in our career now, where we’ve had a good few albums, and we’re our own record label. Now we can pick and choose when we want to tour, how we want to tour, and where we want to go. It is cool. We’re lucky that we’re at that stage. It’s not an easy industry, and we’re lucky that we still sell tickets and people still want to come see us play. So yeah, we really enjoy it. But the Australian crowds are amazing. They get involved and, as I say, it’s a great mixture between expats and Aussies.

The band has been touring fairly solidly this year, how’s that been going so far?
It’s been great. Yeah, we did a big tour of Europe earlier in the year, and it was a lot of fun. You know, it’s funny because in different territories we’re at different sizes, and also because we’ve had a lot of albums, some albums are bigger in different territories than others, and we love the challenge of adapting the set list to the venue and to the crowd. So, for example, in America, we’re touring America next month, the Americans that come to the show don’t really know our back catalog. They would know our more recent albums, maybe the last two or three albums, and they don’t know the early Coronas stuff. But
when we would go to, maybe even in Australia, because there’s a lot of expats there, they would know the earlier stuff. The Irish people at the shows would know the earlier stuff and want to hear the old songs.

We love the challenge of putting together a set list and trying to keep everyone happy and changing the set list. In Europe as well, it was probably more recent stuff that people wanted to hear, which is cool. I mean, we would be happy just being a nostalgia band and playing our old songs, if that’s what people wanted to hear. But thankfully, there is a demand for the new stuff, and I’m currently in Dingle, County Kerry now, working on what will be the start of our next record. We plan on recording early next year, so I’m writing away for that as well. We’re lucky that we have that mixture.

Have there been any shows that have stood out more than any others as being exceptional?
Yeah, we’ve been lucky enough that we’ve had a lot of great shows. In two weeks’ time we’re playing Glastonbury Festival, which is a big bucket list moment for us for sure. We’ve never played it, never even been to it as a punter. So, we’re really excited to play that. That’s definitely a moment on the calendar coming up soon that we’re really excited about. But some of the shows that we’ve had in Australia have been incredible. I remember we played the Enmore Theatre, which is historic venue.

Even last November we played in the Coogee Beach Hotel in Sydney, and it was just crazy the amount of people there. We’ve been lucky enough to have some great shows, and long may it continue. We’re doing some festivals, and we have a big show in Cork, which isn’t too far from where I am right now, next weekend as well. That’s one of our big Irish shows of the summer. That’s a five thousand capacity arena and it’s almost sold out. We’re lucky that we can sell those tickets at home and get to tour as well. But we love gigging in all sizes, whether it be small rooms or big rooms. We’re happy to adjust the set list and try to put on the best show possible.

Playing Glastonbury must be a real pinch-yourself kind of moment and the thing that dreams are made of?
One hundred percent, we’ve been around for a good few years and a good few albums now, and I think I was beginning to believe we will never get to play Glastonbury and then it happened this year, and we’re just so excited. We’ve got a great slot on the Saturday, sort of late afternoon, early evening before the headliners go on and then we’re just going to enjoy it and stay for the weekend and have fun. Hopefully we get some nice weather. But you’re right, it is definitely a pinch-me moment, one that we can
put on the bio to say that we’ve played there, and we can’t wait.

Are you sticking around for the headliners?
Yeah, Neil Young is on, The Script are playing, there’s some great Irish acts. Kneecap are on the bill. It’s an amazing lineup and there’s like thousands of bands. It’s funny, the headliners to me, I was like looking at it going, yeah, okay, they’re good. But it’s down the bill, there’s just so many acts that I’d love to check out, love to see. There’s just so much on. I think it’s just the experience of it as well, being in such a big festival. I mean, there’s two hundred and fifty thousand people going to be at this thing. It’s just hard to get your head around. I’ve never been at a festival of that size, so it’ll be a lot of fun lapping it up.

Is there a different focus with the set list this time? Is that more about the entire back catalogue and a little bit of the new album?
Yeah, exactly. We have a festival set, for sure, where we would probably play more of the older stuff and not as many from the new album. But, as I say, the new songs have been going down really well. That’s Exactly What Love Is, which is a duet with Gabrielle Aplin that we did on the new album, it’s been going down as well as any of the old stuff, so it’s great to see that. But yeah, you’re right. The festival set will be upbeat and straight in, song after song after song, and just blast them out and try to keep the morale high.

It won’t be a long journey, because when we play our own shows now, our set is over an hour and a half. We’ve so many albums, even our big shows at home, we might even play for two hours. But at Glastonbury, I think our set is fifty minutes. So it’s going to be probably twelve songs, and we just bang them out. It’s going to be a lot of fun. So yeah, we’ll pick the big moments for sure that the crowd will be into, and hopefully they’ll sing along with us.

Are you still blown away with the feedback to Thoughts and Observations?
Yeah, we really are and we’re getting to see it now, because we’re touring this year. As I say, we got to tour in Europe, and now we’re going off to America, and you can see the reaction of people. It’s been great and it makes us positive about the future. We’d be happy enough if we were just a nostalgia act and people just wanted to hear the first album, we would take that because we love playing but the fact that we seem to be having a sort of, I don’t know, a different chapter at the moment with our last couple of records, and it seems to be connecting with people, it is really cool. It’s really positive moving forward. So we’re excited about keeping that going and writing and seeing how long we can continue to get away with having our dream jobs.

Is that a tough juggle, trying to tour and then find time to write and record a new album?
It can be, it can be. But I think we’re lucky again that we’ve been doing this a while. We’re our own label now. We pick and choose the venues or the countries we tour, and we can set time aside. There’s no one really breathing down our neck. We don’t have a label going, “We need an album now.” But funnily enough, that can often make you work harder, because if things aren’t going well, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. When something goes wrong, you can always go, “Oh, the label didn’t do this,” or “They didn’t promote that right,” or “They didn’t tell us to do that,” or whatever. But when you start your own label, you need to take a long hard look at yourself. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself if anything goes wrong. So if anything, it’s made us work harder. Even this week, I had three days off, and I knew I had a couple of interviews to do. I said, I’ll just come to Dingle and do the interviews down here. I got my little mini studio set up, and I might do some work, even though it’s only a small couple of days I had. We like the challenge of trying to work. Thankfully, there’s not too much pressure like, “We need an album in a month” type thing. As I said, we’re planning on roughly recording early January next year. That’s the plan. So in between all the touring, I’ll have time to do a bit of work and get the songs together.

Have you got a bit of an idea of the direction you want to take the next album?
It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the songs. We’ve got a handful of songs, but it’s probably too early to say if sonically we will move in a different direction or anything like that, but the songs we have got we’re happy with. The guys came down here to Dingle, and we fleshed out a few of the ideas that I had and worked on them together and wrote together. We’re excited about it. I think it’s an extension of where we’ve come from. It feels like the last three records have been a trilogy. They were in the same world and I think with the next record, we’re going to try something a little different and push ourselves in a different direction a little bit. Whether that comes to fruition or not, that’s just the general vibe that we’re feeling at the moment. We want to take a turn and it won’t be a huge departure. It’ll still be Coronas. It’ll still have my annoying voice on top of a three-and-a-half-minute song. We still try and be honest songwriters, and melody is always very important. But at the same time, I do think sonically we might try something different, that’s just me being honest. You know, we might have a chat at the gig in November, and I’ll go, “No, I threw all that out the window. We’re going back, and it’s going to be similar to the sound of the last album.” But at the moment, that’s where we’re leaning.

Having been here four times now, have you got any favorite Australian bands that you’re really into?
Yeah, there’s a couple. But I’m obsessed with Gang of Youths, I love them so much. The last record was great, but Go Farther in Lightness is probably my go-to record of theirs. I still go back to it. I got to meet the singer Dave Le’aupepe, and I met him once, and he was such a sweetheart. I’ve never seen them live. I’d love to see them live, but they’re a band that I continue to go back and listen to, and they definitely have influenced our last couple of records, I would say. He has a great way with words, and I just love the sound of that band. So hopefully, yeah, I get to see them live one day, because I still haven’t. They do tend to take a while with the album, but then it’s worth it when it comes out.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Coronas on the following dates, tickets from Troubadour Presents…