The Scratch
The Scratch are a four-piece band that sound like no one else you’ve ever heard before, featuring Conor Dockery (guitar, backing vocals), Cathal McKenna (bass/backing vocals), Daniel Lang (cajón, percussion, lead vocals), and Jordan O'Leary (guitar, lead vocals).
Like all the great progressive musicians, they turn music on its head and pour their hearts and souls into their art to forge something original and new. Musicians making the time-honoured leap from acoustic to electric are well-documented, but The Scratch did it the other way round.
Bob Dylan famously received a hostile reaction when he went electric in 1965. When The Scratch went acoustic, they ushered in a new and exciting creative chapter. What's more, they signed to Sony Music Ireland and are on the same roster as Bob Dylan! Prior to The Scratch, they were a "a full-blown metal band" called Red Enemy, who released an album and toured the UK and US. After Red Enemy fizzled out, four of its five members re-convened. "We started looking at ways to express ourselves a bit more authentically," Conor Dockery says. "Something we could put our individual personalities into." They swapped the electric axes and amps for acoustics.
The fledgling band found their feet jamming in their kitchen, creating freewheeling, intrepid music, which is laced with humour, honesty, devilment, and an overwhelmingly positive spirit, refreshingly free from the constraints of a recording studio or rehearsal room. Upon discovering Glen Hansard's version of 'Gold' by Interference, an Irish band featuring the late Fergus O'Farrell, The Scratch were profoundly inspired by the song's tuning, especially its percussiveness and the creative possibilities it opened up.
This provided a template for the band to pursue a musical journey incorporating hard-rock and metal dynamics with adventurous acoustic-based music, while additionally using a cajón, a box-shaped drum that originated in Peru. This organic method was liberating on so many levels. They jammed, wrote, and rehearsed to their heart’s content, and at entirely their own pace. The lads adopted a similar approach to playing live. Rather than juggling all the cumbersome requirements of lugging gear around, arranging backline, and the all the usual behind-the-scenes palaver that comes with putting on a gig, they chose to busk.
The immediacy of busking was so much fun that they took their music beyond the Pale into the towns and cities of Ireland. This readiness to play anywhere and everywhere brought them to Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal for the annual Rory Gallagher International Festival in 2017. The spirit of Jimi Hendrix's favourite guitarist of all-time hovered over the proceedings.
A video of The Scratch in full flight was uploaded online. The rest became viral history, quickly notching up over a million views. This sudden boost to their profile led to new opportunities. Whelan’s in Dublin, one of the country's best-loved music venues, who have a long-standing reputation for incubating national and international talent, invited them to play a free gig on Wexford Street. They stuffed the joint to the rafters, instantly winning over new hearts, minds, and ears and creating a deeply committed and loyal fanbase in the process.
The Scratch put out a self-released album, 'Couldn’t Give a Rats'. So far, so good. Only problem was its timing, emerging in early April, 2020, literally a few short weeks after the world shut down. An appearance at the Sunstroke festival in Punchestown alongside Faith No More was shelved, as was a host of other tantalising
