Kodaline on splitting up: ‘Two of us wanted to leave – that meant it was over’

It’s a warm Saturday evening in the grounds of Malahide Castle, a grand 250-acre parkland just north of Dublin, and Kodaline are 90 minutes away from an emotional, bittersweet concert. Last October, the much-loved Irish band announced they were to split after a new album, We Were Only Young, and farewell tour. Tonight is their last hometown show, a huge outdoor gig to 30,000 people just a few miles away from where they formed in Swords, County Dublin. Backstage pre-gig, in one of several small overheated portacabins, I ask singer-songwriter Steve Garrigan and drummer Vinny May about their favourite memories of being Kodaline. “For me, it’s random stuff,” says Garrigan. He brings up an appearance on a TV show called Taratata, the French equivalent to Later… With Jools Holland. Jetlagged, Garrigan forgot the words during the performance. “I just completely went blank. My brain just switched off, and I just didn’t sing for about three minutes. It got really awkward.” He says you can see this on YouTube. “They left it in. I don’t know why. I watched it recently. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ But long story short, we ended up winning the crowd over and it went really well. It’s really cool to watch.” “Glastonbury when the PA didn’t work,” May says of the first of three Worthy Farm appearances in 2013 in the John Peel Tent. “We’re rocking out and sounding great, then everybody in the crowd is just saying ‘up!’” There was no sound coming from the stage. “We had two minutes of standing by side of stage while they figured it out,” May says. “We thought our career was over,” Garrigan adds. But they got the okay to resume. “And then it was a f***ing great gig,” May says. It’s notable, I say, that they both picked moments of overcoming adversity and turning near-disaster into triumph. “I think for us, the overcoming adversity thing is big,” May says. They agree that success has been hard fought and “slow”, as Garrigan puts it, even though there’s been lots of it: three number one albums (and a number two) in their native Ireland; two million albums sales worldwide; two songs from 2013 million-selling debut album In a Perfect World, “Brand New Day” and “Perfect World”, becoming the beloved soundtrack to Gogglebox. “Even ‘All I Want’,” Garrigan says of the band’s most enduring song, an epic slow-build anthem with 1.5 billion streams and counting, “was never a radio hit song.” The band are going out on their own terms (Photo: Jennifer McCord) In fact, it didn’t even go to radio at all after they argued against an edit cutting the song from five minutes to three. “It didn’t work – it just fell apart,” Garrigan says. But helped by a sync on US TV show Grey’s Anatomy, it’s now the sort of standard that American Idol contestants sing, and is not the only Kodaline song to have proved far-reaching. Garrigan recalls hearing their debut single “High Hopes” – the band’s only number one and a misunderstood ballad (“it’s not about a relationship; it’s about hitting rock bottom,” he says) – on a backpacking holiday in Cambodia. “As soon as we got onto the island, from this wooden shack on the beach, I heard this weird, obscure remix of ‘High Hopes’. And I was like, ‘What the f***? I can’t get away from it!’” Still, the pair view themselves as an Irish success story. “We’re almost a cliche Irish band,” Garrigan says. “We started in pubs, really. Busking on Grafton Street. We’ve never shied away from using trad instruments. We understand that we’re the exception and not the rule in terms of bands that break out [of Ireland].” They’ve enjoyed great camaraderie with other Irish acts; Ronan Keating allowed them to use his studio early on after he remembered the first incarnation of the band, 21 Demands, who had finished second on the 2006 edition of RTÉ talent show You’re a Star; The Cranberries took Kodaline on tour; Bono became a fan and champion. “Anointed by the Hand of God,” May smiles. Did he give them the Bono talk? “He said, ‘Don’t do drugs and stay together’,” Garrigan says. “Well, I didn’t do any drugs.” Kodaline won’t be together for much longer: a farewell worldwide tour is scheduled to end at London’s Roundhouse in December. Even if it has been six years since they released music – final album We Were Only Young, their fifth, is due in October – it was still something of a surprise when they announced their intention to split. What was the fans’ reaction? “At first, they were pretty shocked,” Garrigan says. “I was taken aback by the initial reaction. It’s the music industry and bands come and go. I suppose I didn’t realise how loyal our fans were and how far and wide they stretched.” The environment in the band has not been the best for years, says Garrigan (Photo: Samir Hussein/WireImage) Has there been any “how dare you?” “A few of that too,” Garrigan smiles. “There are still people who are just saying, ‘Please don’t split up.’ But for the most part, it’s just people saying that the music has helped them. A lot of songs have connected with them in such a way that they’ve used them for weddings and funerals and important moments in their lives. It’s awesome to see. We wouldn’t be anywhere without the fans.” May says the fans they’ve met at this run of shows have been thankful, with cheeky requests for their favourite deep cuts. On the face of it, fans might wonder why Kodaline are calling it a day: they still have eight million monthly Spotify listeners, and tonight is their third huge outdoor Irish gig this week. There is an aspect of their changing lives and shifting priorities as they become fathers in their 30s. “Soundcheck today was like a daycare centre,” May laughs. But there has seemingly been a fracture in the band’s relationships. Guitarist Mark Prendergast and bassist Jason Boland, who replaced original member Conor Linnane in 2012, are not doing any press on this farewell run. Was the decision to split a mutual one? “I think the environment in the band has not been the best for years,” Garrigan says. “And it’s just been a bit chaotic. But that’s rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not a standard thing. It’s four people, four different opinions. It’s like a marriage. But there was a point where the two other guys wanted to leave. And I just felt like if one goes, it’s kind of over. But I was a little bit fed up with it at one point as well.” Garrigan has been very open about his struggles with mental health and anxiety, documented in his songs as well as his 2021 memoir High Hopes. He says the demands of the music industry, of which he is clearly sick, have hardly helped. “The goalposts are always moving. You achieve something, and then there’s something else.” He’s decided to live by a maxim he saw from Bleachers frontman and Taylor Swift producer Jack Antonoff. “He said something amazing: ‘Don’t let temporary people make permanent decisions’.” Their last album is due in October Garrigan says internal tensions largely explain the six-year gap between 2020’s One Day at a Time. “A lot of that was to do with the dynamic in the band, and just taking breaks from each other. It just wasn’t good.” But Kodaline has nonetheless produced a fitting swansong: We Were Only Young is full of very Garrigan melodic, heartfelt songcraft about love, grief, and the passing of time (as well as music industry screed on the poppy “Vultures”) that will delight fans. Garrigan wrote the finger-picking wistful ballad “Without You” for his wedding day last summer. “I’m really awkward, especially when I’m speaking to a crowd, so I wanted to do a song instead of a speech. And it’s funny, I did do a little speech, and I was so bad our old producer said he’d never seen a room die so quick, but then come back with the song.” The piano ballad title track contains the line “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” – could he one day think that about the band? “For me, that was always about the band,” Garrigan says. “I think the whole album is actually about the band, other than the wedding songs.” Even if they have considered the future – Garrigan plans to go solo, May plans to take time off – the reality that Kodaline is coming to end is slowly dawning on them. “Moments like Cork last night when we were playing, it was like, ‘Oh, it’s the last time we’re gonna play in this city,’” says May. “So you get a bit of nostalgia, and it comes over you.” Coming onstage to a late evening sunset, the show was moving and uplifting in equal measure: a 30,000-strong home crowd singing back anthem after anthem, culminating in an epic, unifying, extended take on “All I Want”. They are proud of going out while they still elicit that kind of reaction. “We’ve achieved so much,” Garrigan says. “It’s crazy. From battle of the bands at school to tonight. And most bands either fizzle out or something happens so they have to break up.” “We are going out on our own terms,” May says, proudly. Kodaline’s final album We Were Only Young is out on 2 October. Their final UK tour begins on 12 December