The Mahones, 35th Anniversary Tour
Tuesday, 24 February 2026
Quantic, Bucharest, Romania
“A Tragicomic Experience”
Whenever I’m in Bucharest, I meet up with an old friend and former colleague, Victor. He always takes care of the evening’s entertainment, and this time around, in a city that never sleeps, he picked a concert by Irish folk-punk outfit The Mahones, originally from Canada. I’d never heard of them before, but why not give some Irish jigs a spin, the kind I know from the more famous and commercially successful bands The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, and Flogging Molly? I’d already been to a couple of gigs at Quantic and it’s a perfect spot for this kind of thing — a bar in each wing and a hall in the middle for around 1,000 people.
We skipped the support act, deep in conversation over great beer and nachos loaded with Romanian sausage. At nine we walked into the hall, which had, give or take, all of fifty people in it. They were staring at the stage in bewilderment, where singer and guitarist Finny McConnell (can you imagine a more perfect name for a singer in an Irish punk folk band?) and his crew were wandering around looking lost — bassist Sean “R!ot” Ryan, drummer Guillaume Lauzon, a Polish violinist whose name I never caught, and a harmonica player who stood alone in a dark corner on the right side of the stage. Why were the people so bewildered, you ask?
Because the band wasn’t playing music in any real sense of the word. Finny’s guitar was cranked down to zero, the bass and the violin were in tune — I can’t even say each in its own key, more like each in its own universe. The harmonica player occasionally jumped in with some incoherent, rambling solo. The only one taking the concert seriously was the drummer, who was doing his best to hold together the collapsing cacophony of sound.
Finny was rambling into the microphone with anecdotes from the good old days, when The Mahones apparently burned bright on stages around the world alongside dear friends from the bands mentioned above. Meanwhile, the bassist and the violinist were improvising their own separate melodies simultaneously. The harmonica player hunched over and hid in his corner, while the drummer, a mad gleam in his eyes, valiantly kept at it. A few times they even tried to kick into a song, only to grind to a desperate halt after about twenty seconds. Finny, tilting back a bottle of whiskey, proudly announced that they’d come straight from the van and had of course missed the soundcheck. Who would’ve thought?
Romanian profanities started raining down from the crowd, and I chimed in with “Play some fuckin’ music, please” — but Finny quickly consoled me with the announcement that he’s not a musician or singer, he’s a storyteller. And so on, several more times. Victor and I started making increasingly frequent trips to the bar to dull the pain with beer and reassure ourselves that some form of music was actually happening on stage.
This calvary dragged on for the better part of an hour, and the crowd just stuck around, presumably because there was nothing better to do. Then a minor miracle happened. It was as if whatever the band had been consuming in the van before the show started to wear off a bit. Finny strode over to his amp and turned it up to 6, someone in the meantime managed to get the bass guitar in tune, and the lads started to play. Since they probably couldn’t remember their own songs anymore, they fell back on The Pogues and The Ramones standards and a few acoustic ballads. And so we had ourselves a party for the next hour and a half. The setlist was probably SOMETHING LIKE THIS, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
The Mahones have been going for 35 years — by Finny’s account, the longest-running active Irish punk band out there. Thirteen albums to their name, and they were probably in better shape at some point than they were on that rainy evening in Bucharest. As I can see, they were also in Kranj a few days earlier (Trainstation SubArt), and for the sake of Slovenian fans I sincerely hope things went more smoothly there.
I honestly don’t know. I’m always up for a boozy escapade, but this was genuinely below the bar. The late Shane MacGowan, with all his moments of inspired chaos, came across as a consummate professional next to the jovial Finny and company. There’s also a slim chance this was a choreographed bit meant to be funny. If so, I’d like to inform Finny and the gang that they should work up something better.
The band promised to hang around after the show, but every single person in that room — with Victor and me leading the charge — sprinted as far from the stage and the cheery “Irishmen” as they could get. Soul-destroying.
Author: Igorac
Photos: Igorac
