West Cork all-female band The Kates are set to launch their debut EP ‘Pictures Here of Dreams’ this month at the Clonakilty International Guitar Festival. A much-loved local band, The Kates were initially set up by folk and country musician Paula K O’Brien. Paula and her family organise a fundraiser for Ovacare each year in memory of her mother who passed away from ovarian cancer. “The second year that we put it on, I had this idea of playing purely songs written or performed by women”, she explains. “And what better way to do that than to put together a band of female musicians.”
She asked fellow singer-songwriters Eve Clague, Míde Houlihan, and Liz Clark if they wanted to take part and everyone came on board. With Paula now on bass duties, Eve and Liz on the guitar, and Míde on the drums, the band called itself ‘The Kates’ in honour of Paula’s mother, Catherine.
There was no plan to do any more than the one gig, but the girls had so much fun, loved each other’s company, and learned so much from playing together, that they decided to just keep gigging. “There was a bit of interest and people seemed to get behind it”, Paula says. “But it’s really only in the last two years that we’ve begun to gel together as a band”. Though Marybeth O’Mahony wasn’t there at the very start, she joined the band two years ago on keyboard duties. “She shut us all up!”, Paula laughs.
You could call The Kates a ‘super band’ considering each member of the band is a singer and a songwriter in her own right. Guitarist and mandolin player Paula K O’Brien performs with her good friend Archie and with Clonakilty folk and bluegrass trio Wayward Folk, playing a mix of original songs and covers. Baltimore musician Liz Clarke has several albums under her belt, notably the ‘Lonely and The Moose’ concept written with her wife Tessa Perry while they lived apart. In hospital settings, she does community music with the older population as part of the Arts for Health programme and has led the Starling Song Project to preserve their stories and heritage in the form of song. She also runs the community choir in Skibbereen.
Míde Houlihan studied music at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa and released her EP ‘Shifting Gears’ in 2019. Her debut album ‘Coloured In’ was released in 2015, winning the IMRO Christie Hennessy Songwriting Award with her song ‘Nuts and Bolts’. Eve Clague and Marybeth O’Mahony got to know each other at the Cork School of Music (now MTU) where they both studied vocal training. Eve released her debut EP ‘Young Naïve Me’ in 2019, and every year picks up her saxophone for the Cork Jazz festival. Marybeth works mostly in collaboration settings, recording with 1000 Beasts producer Cian McSweeney and Eve’s brother Sam Clague.
The Kates’ debut EP will be launched at the Clonakilty International Guitar Festival this September with the official release date set for September 20. The evocative title ‘Pictures Here of Dreams’ was taken from a line in their first single ‘All That Talk’ written by Míde released last June and put on the RTE Radio 1 Recommends playlist two weeks in a row. The EP features five songs, each written by one of the girls. “You’ll get a taste of each of our songwriting, and there’s diversity in all the songs but there’s also a common thread”, shares Liz.
The tracks were recorded with Brian Casey and Sarah O’Mahony at Wavefield Recordings just outside Clonakilty. Recording was a collaborative process, and together with Brian they argued whether to use a click on some of the songs. “We wanted to get the most natural sound that we could”, Eve says. “Some things needed a click for adding harmonies, and that’s what we did. We just kept adding and songs just kept getting more adaptive. We were huffing and puffing about lots of stuff but in the end, we got there!”, she laughs. “We knew the songs, but we didn’t know them inside out”, Marybeth continues. “It was a good idea to go straight in and record them even if we hadn’t been playing them for years. Now that we’re gigging them and we’ve heard the recordings, we’re way more confident behind the songs and playing them. I think it was a great way to do it”.
Recording together has also helped the musicians grow their confidence in terms of showing each other what they’ve written. “Even the confidence to say ‘what if we talked about this or change a sentence in this way’, so we’re developing ourselves in that respect”, Paula explains. “One of the biggest things about us is our harmony. We’re very vocally driven and that’s what really comes to the fore when we start working on songs. Marybeth is really strong on working out harmonies, so I think that’s one of our most defining features”.
The girls reveal that developing visual identity around the EP was a lot of fun. Keeping it West Cork, all the photography was done at Warren beach. Celeste Burdon held the reins behind the camera, Megan Clancy designed the EP artwork and the band logo, and up-and-coming fashion and costume designer Faye Clague along with Kez Perry styled the musicians for the photoshoot. “That was really invigorating and collaborative”, Paula enthuses. “We had some great people around us pushing us on and giving us that bit of encouragement”. Despite spending considerable time getting the artwork right, there will be no physical copies of the EP at the launch. “We’re going to be doing limited T-shirts for the Guitar Festival, so you’ll have to be first at the gig to get one!”, Eve declares.
Apart from Pillow Queens, Mongoose, PowPig, and now defunct trio Wyvern Lingo, there isn’t a lot of all-female Irish bands, and female representation is one of the main reasons why The Kates decided to keep playing together after that initial gig for Ovacare. “Obviously we wanted to shine a light on the contribution that women have in music”, Paula shares. “The more that we play, the more other people might start playing, it’s incremental – if a couple of girls pick up a guitar because they see us playing then that’s incredible!”
But being an all-female band is not easy and you consistently have to prove yourself. “From the very beginning, we realised we had to practice that much harder to prove that we weren’t a gimmick, that we’re not trying to be the Spice Girls, we’re actually just musicians in a room like everybody else”, Liz shares. “We realised we can’t mess this up because we walk into a room and there’s an assumption about us already before we even play. There have been a lot of assumptions about if we can play our instruments well, if we know how to use our equipment and our amplifiers and the sound equipment well. People consistently make assumptions about us – if the girls are all fighting and if we’re all trying to be the lead and the star. And that pushes us too, to prove that we’re serious”, she insists.
Over the summer, The Kates played outside of West Cork, performing at the Night and Day festival in Roscommon and at the Clonmel Busking Festival. “It was an amazing experience, and it was great to get our name out there”, Paula says. Initially launching at the Clonakilty Guitar festival on September 20, ‘Pictures Here of Dreams’ will see The Kates partake in Oíche Mná, a charity fundraiser in aid of the West Cork Women Against Violence project at Connolly’s of Leap on September 27, followed by a gig at Coughlan’s the next day in Cork city. At the end of October, the band will leave Rebel County and travel up to Dublin for their first ever headline gig in Whelan’s. The Kates are indeed following their dream.
‘Pictures Here of Dreams’ launches at the Clonakilty International Guitar Festival and releases on all online platforms on September 20
