Cork Folk Festival: Scullion
Sun 11 Oct 2026
2pm
€30
For over four decades, Scullion have remained one of Ireland’s most distinctive musical voices, blending Folk, Rock, Americana, Traditional Irish music and poetic storytelling.
The group have recently been working in Big Tree Studio with acclaimed producer John Reynolds on a new collection of songs, described by the band as a deeply creative and energizing experience. “ Home In The Sky” will be released in 2027.
‘I’m down in the city, you know where to find me, I’m up on the top floor, just under the moon’ This is the refrain from Sonny Condell’s timeless anthem, Down In The City, and it’s the inspiration for us to take what we do out on the road for evenings of songs, conversations, tunes and stories.
This gang of musicians we call Scullion have been singing and playing in bar rooms, box rooms and bedrooms, front rooms and back rooms the world over for several decades. Scullion began in Ireland in the late 70’s at a time of great musical innovation and flowering. The tradition was flying. Planxty, The Bothy Band and De Danann were playing really wonderful music. Mulligan Records was releasing The Boomtown Rats, The Radiators,
Midnight Well, Sonny Condell and Scullion. The band was a hybrid, a coming together of different musical strands and traditions. The original group featured the piping of Jimmy O’Brien Moran and the jazz and funk influenced guitar playing of tHe late Greg Boland. But the mainstay of the band was and is Sonny Condell.
We were up and running and out on the road. A very different road to the road of today. There were no motorways and no motorway services and the traffic was chaotic. Getting there was difficult. Getting back was a challenge. Everything closed. Running out of fuel was regular. But the gigs, the shows in a whole necklace of venues and bars, colleges and clubs were wonderful in every way, sustaining, uplifting and delightful. There were no phones. When you were gone, you were gone. Nobody expected you to call. Nobody expected you to text saying ‘five minutes and I’ll be there’. There was no social media - no tweets or twittering. No facebook surveillance. No instagram, no Whatsapp. Just a phone box with button A and button B. If you needed to make a call and you rarely, if ever, needed to make a call.
So here in 2026 things come full circle
As the world has become a little more virtual, a little bit more augmented, a little more digital, with the attention merchants vying for our time and the phone never too far away we are out to reclaim some space when we sing and play and chat with each other and with our friends, turn off our devices and live in the present.
So we feel so lucky to be playing singing performimg and recording right now, refreshed and renewed and a part of the diverse, magical and most creative musical community in Ireland.
Considered one of Ireland’s most innovative and celebrated bands, Scullion grew from a chance meeting of its two main founders, Philip King and Sonny Condell. Scullion’s back catalogue include the pop and folk anthems ‘Down In the City’, ‘Eyelids into Snow’ and ‘John the Baptist’. The band’s most recent album Long Wave, their first in over 27 years, was launched to critical acclaim and extensive nationwide tour, reconfirming their status as one of Ireland’s most popular bands.
Sonny Condell, the creative core and inspiration for the band, continues to invent and innovate. He with Robbie Overson and Philip King creates the signature sound that is Scullion.
They remain to this day an innovative driving force in music in Ireland.
“Scullion are a remarkable collective: a trio of fine musicians who marry their keen appetites for pithy rhymes, unlikely melodic arcs and rhythmic complexity to exceedingly fine effect”— The Irish Times
“Scullion were mould-breakers in the ’70s and early ’80s. Drawing on experimental rock, Americana and folk, they won praise for albums such as Balance and Control and White Side of Night”— The Examiner
“decades on from their formative gigs together, the bands sound is as strong as ever, maturing like a good wine, gaining depth and clarity,The voices of Sonny Condell and Philip King have taken on a seamless harmony, pinioned by the bravura guitar playing of Robbie Overson”— HotPress
