OXEGEN 2011:North inner-city Dubliners Original Rudeboys only formed in March, but their acoustic hip-hop attracted a huge online following and they've been added to the Oxegen bill. Sean Arkins tells BRIAN BOYDabout life in the fast lane

Introduce yourselves

There's three of us, we're from the Five Lamps area of north inner-city Dublin and we've an average age of 21. We began by just uploading a video on to YouTube – the song Stars in My Eyes– and we just got thousands upon thousands of hits. How people have found us is beyond me, but the response on YouTube and Facebook has been incredible. We'd go back every day thinking that would be it in terms of interest, but we'd find that the 10,000 hits had become 20,000. We only put up the songs for our mates to hear, so the idea of getting all this attention from so many people is really strange.

What do you sound like?

So far mainly acoustic – we use guitar and ukulele and vocals. Someone said we’re like a mix of Ray LaMontagne and The Streets, which is a huge honour. I’ve been involved in the tiny Irish hip-hop world for years, and my big inspirations would be Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. And I really look up to and admire Mike Skinner. It’s the poetry that gets me – I can relate to him more than any other artist. The Dubliners and Damian Dempsey get mentioned sometimes as well, which is fine by us because we’re huge fans of both.

Is the Irish hip-hop scene changing (it was never that big in the first place)?

Irish hip-hop was always a very small underground scene. I used to put up raps on a local forum, but it had only about 200 people on it. There’s people doing interesting stuff though.

You’ve only three songs available online so far. Why such a huge response so soon?

We’ve no idea. We did the analytics on our Facebook and YouTube pages, where you can see where all the hits are coming from, and it’s not just Ireland: we’re getting played in the UK, Australia and the US. We’ve got a lot more new tracks ready to go now but the three of us wouldn’t know the first thing about independently releasing an album, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Have any labels been sweet-talking you?

There’s been interest here and there with people saying this and that. We’re only together a few months, so I think people are waiting to see how we develop. For us it’s just about the gigs at the moment – to be able to sell out three Academy gigs is huge for us.

How will your acoustic rap sound go down at a big music festival? Difficult to reach the end of the field with that

For Oxegen we’re getting in a drummer and an electric guitarist. That’s just to fill out the sound. They’re veterans of the music world compared to us and the new sound is great.

Stars in My Eyesis now up to 100,000 hits on YouTube with a 98 per cent “like” percentage – what’s the song about?

All of our songs are written from just sitting around and jamming. Robert and Sean and myself just get them that way. With Stars in My Eyes,Robert had the melody line and I suppose the lyrics are just about the celebrity world and all those dreamers out there. You can't get too specific about what songs mean.

What next for The Original Rudeboys?

We’ve got management now, so that helps. The immediate plan is to keep on playing live. We also want to record all the new material we have, which is lots.

Have you been to Oxegen before?

No, I could never afford the three-day ticket.

* Original Rudeboys play the Vodafone stage at Oxegen today