Gaelic Storm & The High Kings
Wednesday, March 22, 2023 at 7:30pm at Union County PAC
What is Gaelic Storm? They’re a chart topping Celtic band with 7 Billboard World Music number ones. They work hard and they play hard, being on tour 200+ days a year for 20+ years. They’re the band you saw in Titanic, and most importantly, they’re more fun than a barrel of drunken monkeys!
The band (Ryan Lacey, Patrick Murphy, Katie Grennan, Steve Twigger, and Pete Purvis) attributes their continued success to their fanatic audience, and it’s a well-diversified crowd for sure. The country-music folks adore the storytelling, the bluegrass-heads love the instrumentals, Celtic fans love their devotion to tradition, and the rockers simply relish the passion they play their instruments with.
Gaelic Storm takes a true blue-collar, hard-nose approach to touring, consistently traveling the US and internationally over 200 days a year, forging a unique path in the Celtic music world. “You have to see us live. We are the true working-mans’ band,” says Lacey, who joined the line-up in 2003. “We still, and most likely always will, tour most of the year, and that’s how we constantly hone our craft.”
The dedication to live shows date all the way back to the mid-1990s, when Gaelic Storm kicked off its career as a pub band in Santa Monica, California. Due to their discovery at the pub, by the end of the decade, the musicians had appeared in the blockbuster film Titanic (where they performed “Irish Party in Third Class”). This laid the groundwork for a career that would eventually find them topping the Billboard World Chart six times, making appearances at mainstream music festivals, and regularly headlining the largest Irish Festivals across the country, all the while gaining a reputation as a genre-bending Irish rock band, whose songs mix Celtic traditions with something uniquely creative.
After 15 years at the top of their game, The High Kings (Finbarr Clancy, Darren Holden, Paul O’ Brien, and Brian Dunphy) are still selling out venues around the world to an ever-growing army of loyal fans. With a million listeners on Spotify and 2 platinum to their credit, The High Kings are celebrating 15 years together by joining Gaelic Storm for The Mighty Tour!
Widely regarded as the standard-bearer for their genre The High Kings continue to surprise and delight! Notable performances include Glastonbury, the Isle of Wight, and NYC’s Times Square. They proudly headlined the 2015 St Patrick’s Day concert in Trafalgar Square, London The High Kings have performed for hundreds of thousands of fans, including President George W Bush (2009), the Prime Minister of England (2011), and President Barack Obama (2012).