Hothouse Flowers are back in bloom

Liam Ó Maonlaí is bruised.

Twenty years in the music industry have scarred the Hothouse Flowers singer. “If you go back to 1994, Hothouse Flowers decided to take a break, because the machine was killing me, killing all of us, in fact,” says Ó Maonlaí. “We definitely needed time away. Then, one year become another year. When we got back together, things were very different. We had become a cottage industry, really. We were doing it on our own terms.”

Championed by everyone from U2 to Gay Byrne, in the late ’80s the Dubliners were one of Ireland’s biggest music exports. Starting with ‘Don’t Go’, they notched up a slew of top ten hits across Europe and built a huge fan base among Irish-Americans. They seemed destined for a long sojourn at the top. It didn’t work out. Ó Maonlai says there was an unsustainable tension between who they were as artists and the group their record label wanted them to be. They were never going to be just another pop outfit.