Sultans of Ping at Vicar Street review: ‘It’s good to be in your little f**king town’

Sultans of Ping

Vicar Street, Dublin

★★★★☆

It’s a big weekend for Cork, with Cillian Murphy in the running to win the best actor Oscar on Sunday night and 1990s indie icons Sultans of Ping marking the 30th anniversary of debut album, Casual Sex in the Cineplex, with one of their largest-ever Irish shows.

“It’s good to be in your little f**king town,” frontman Niall O’Flaherty tells Dublin early in an exhilarating gig. A whippet with a wavy haircut seemingly unchanged since 1992, he’s playfully confrontational throughout the evening – a nostalgic callback to the days when bands were as happy challenging their audience as pandering to them.

The Sultans’ blessing and curse was to announce themselves back in the day with the bubblegum grenade that was Where Me’s Jumper? Mixing biting underdog wit with a punk aesthetic that owed more to New York than to London, the tune was an instant classic, and they lived much of their career in its shadow.

It also made it easy for the British music press to caricature the group as madcap pranksters. This was a misunderstanding of their music – fuelled by poetic absurdism and mosh pit anarchy rather than wackiness – and of Cork’s indie scene, which had a surreal streak extending back to the 1980s and outfits such as Five Go Down To Sea? and Microdisney.

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The New York Dolls meets Flann O’Brien was never a formula for long-term success. However, the Sultans released three albums before the Britpop tsunami swallowed them. Those waters have long since receded, and The Sultans have been discovered by new generations thanks to appearances on the soundtracks of TV shows such as Moone Boy and Young Offenders.

They open with Back in A Tracksuit, a pogoing haiku fuelled by the twin guitars of Pat O’Connell and Sam Steiger (a former member of the Golden Horde and controversial Dubliner in our midst).

The energy, though, comes from O’Flaherty. He rushes the barricade, climbs on a speaker, and tells the crowd that the Sultans, primarily based aboard, have been monitoring the recent referendum. “If it were up to me, I would have voted No,” he jokes. “There is no way bearded people should be allowed into music venues.”

The Sultans have reunited on and off across the decades, though all have day jobs. O’Flaherty has a PhD from Cambridge and is a history lecturer in London; drummer Morty McCarthy works in music merchandising, and O’Connell has a career in finance in London.

But those trappings of grown-up life fall away, as do the years, as they hopscotch through 2 Pints of Rasa – a love song set against the backdrop of the Cork rave scene – and the ominous Turnip Fish. The latter is their true anthem: it inspires the “Turnip dance” – a ritual involving dozens of middle-aged men lying on their backs, kicking their feet in the air.

Where’s Me Jumper? arrives towards the end. How wonderful it remains – a profound, comedic lament for a “brand new sweater” that has gone missing. Young and old dance bumper-to-bumper and Vicar Street becomes one huge, celebratory mosh-pit. It’s a reminder rock music can, and should, aspire to more than Bono-style po-faced earnestness – and that no Irish band has captured the liberating fervour of punk better than the Sultans.