The Rumjacks: Angry, Upside-Down Celtic Punks! (2017)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Zdenko Frangež
Photos: Zdenko Frangež

Venue: MC Pekarna Maribor
Concert date: 20.09.2017

At first glance The Rumjacks are a funny but actually pretty successful combo of blokes who grew up on their parents’ Irish and Scottish music …. well, in Australia. With that kind of parental abuse, sooner or later you’re bound to want to scream. Maybe that’s exactly why the kids decided to rebel, and hooray, they became punks.

In 2008 Frankie McLaughlin (vocals and whistle) and Johnny McKelvey (bass) founded a band that belts out some kind of mix of Celtic music and punk. First you think…. yeah, I’m not allowed to write publicly what you think (Psst…: wtf…), but how does it actually sound? You go on YouTube, listen to a few tracks and figure this could be fun. Come on, every beer lover likes Irish pub music. Yeah, so what? It goes down so well with a pint. I didn’t make that up. In fact, heard at home, dry, with no beer, it sounds less fun than at a gig, where one of the first Frankie lines you remember is that being a musician is a great job because it’s practically the only one where you can get hammered on the clock. Anyway, he’d also expected a crowd of slackers and anarchists, but got more of your Celtic folk fans with a few hipsters wondering whether they’d seen right on YouTube how to behave at a gig like this, and the rest, a bit of a mixed, fired-up crowd that nonetheless had a blast at the show.

The lads tear it up in their own way. Oh right, I haven’t even counted them all yet. Joining the two founding members are Gabriel Whitbourne (guitar) and Adam Kenny, who puts a special stamp on the whole thing with those funny instruments typical of Celtic music. It all sounds pretty classically Celtic, only way angrier and with a lot more energy, faster and louder. Let’s say halfway between punk rock and Irish pub music. Shame that in the tiny space of MC Pekarna it all gets too loud fast, and when you add the mix of Irish/Scottish/Australian accents, trying to understand the lyrics only works every now and then. Still, it all goes down nicely in the ear and you just give in to the rhythm and the beer… yeah, if I hadn’t had a camera in my hands the whole time.

All in all, an interesting shake-up of the concert scene in Maribor, even if on a Wednesday. That’s just how it fell, but at least the lads stopped by on their already second European tour. I don’t know how I missed them last year. Shame. If they come back next year, I’m definitely not missing them