Story · Chasing the shiver since 2016

A Kilkenny Accordion, and the Long Way Round

How a name I spotted in a CD booklet in 2018 keeps playing, eight years on.

It started with a name in a booklet.

When we booked the Stephen Stanley Band from Canada for the 2018 festival, I was reading through the sleeve of their album Jimmy & The Moon and found a friend of ours hiding in the credits. Gerard Moloney, from Kilkenny, playing accordion right across the record. His parts had been recorded in Ireland. Stephen and Ger had put music on the same album without ever once being in the same room. I sat with that for a while, and then I had one of those ideas you cannot quite let go of. What if their first meeting happened on our stage.

So I wrote to Stephen and asked how he would feel about me flying Gerard over from Kilkenny to play accordion with the band for their set. Years later, in the liner notes to the live recording, Stephen remembered his answer in four words.

“So, the answer was yes.”

Stephen Stanley

What happened next is the kind of thing this whole festival is made of. The band travelled in, and somewhere on the way the headstock snapped clean off Stephen's Les Paul. A few hours before doors, he had no guitar to play. So I handed him mine, a Gretsch Black Falcon, and that is the guitar you hear on the record. They rehearsed the songs together for the very first time that afternoon. This exact group of players had never played them as one band. Michael Mormecha behind the drums and Ger became friends on the spot. The room was already full when my friend Jeff Robson stepped up to introduce them that Friday evening. I had not heard a note yet, and I already knew it was going to be one of those nights.

They played a set none of us forgot. Stephen has since called it one of the greatest musical pleasures of his life, and from where I stood that night, I understood exactly what he meant.

We never planned to record it. But a familiar face in our crowd, René Geilenkirchen, quietly set up with our sound engineer Oliver Hutten and captured the whole thing. Two years and one pandemic later, with everyone's blessing, it became a live album. You can hear it for yourself.

I am telling you all of this now, in our tenth year, because of what is about to happen this July.

Gerard Moloney is coming back.

This time Ger brings his accordion to Ben de la Cour, and if you know Ben's songs you can already picture what those two could do to a room. But he is not travelling alone. Together with John Gleeson and the Small Change duo, Tony Cleere and Conan Doyle, Gerard forms the Lincoln Skins. And these four carry more of the weekend than almost anyone. They support The Southern Fold at our Welcome Night in Essen-Werden, and they play the late-night session in the courtyard on Saturday, open to all who are still standing.

Ten years chasing the shiver, and this is what a decade actually builds. Not a line-up. A web of people who keep finding their way back. Jeff Robson, who introduced that 2018 set, is still our voice on stage in 2026, which is a quiet ten-year story all of its own. And one accordion player, one name I happened to catch in a booklet eight years ago, now threading through three of our stages. I could not have planned any of it. Nobody could. You just keep booking the music you love, keep saying yes to the good ideas, and every so often the years hand something like this back to you.

The Welcome Night is sold out, but there is a waitlist if you want to take your chance. The Saturday late-night session in the courtyard is open to all. And if you have not yet decided to join us for the weekend itself, maybe a Kilkenny accordion finding its long way round is reason enough.