'Hearing the team sing Killeagh was a beautiful moment': Kingfishr on the summer's hurling anthem

Eoin Fitzgibbon hurled for the east Cork side for 20 years and has now helped contribute the soundtrack to the intercounty season.

HOME TURF: Eddie Keogh (vocals, guitar), Eoghan 'McGoo' McGrath (banjo), and Eoin 'Fitz' Fitzgibbon (bass) with Kingfishr on stage at the Marquee, Cork.  Picture Dan Linehan

Backstage at the Doornroosje Concert Hall in Nijmegen. Vocal warm-ups of an unusual variety. The Munster hurling final is being followed and roared at.

Eoin Fitzgibbon is one-third of indie-folk band Kingfishr. ‘Fitz’, as he’s known to their forever swelling fanbase, is also a Cork hurling disciple.

The former regularly gets in the way of the latter. Case in point is this Sunday, but we’ll park that latest schedule clash for a little while.

When you’re in Washington for the county’s Munster championship opener, Paris for their final round-robin outing, and the Netherlands for the provincial decider, accommodating action needs to be taken. And so at the beginning of the year, Eoin had the good sense to sign up for a GAA+ annual subscription.

Kingfishr were due on the Doornroosje stage at around 8.30pm on the Saturday evening of June 7. Allowing for the one-hour time difference between Nijmegen and the Ennis Road, that left him just enough space on the clock to watch the Cork-Limerick final before heading out to do his own bit of entertaining.

But, of course, Cork and Limerick decided to keep the music blaring beyond the 70 minutes.

“The game ends in a draw and I can’t keep watching because we have to head on stage. So, I have to put my phone down, go play a gig for an hour-and-a-half and wait until after the gig is over before I can find out what happened,” says Fitz of the final night of their European tour.

Backstage again, songs all sung. The Cork supporter doesn’t need to look very hard for the result. His and the band’s inbox overflows with videos of the victorious Cork players singing his and the band’s song in the Gaelic Grounds dressing-room.

“For 20 years of my life, I dreamed about being in that Cork dressing room. So that was a real shock to the system for me. Hearing the team sing Killeagh was a beautiful, beautiful moment.” 

There was no Nijmegen or New York booking the evening of the All-Ireland semi-final. Fitz was at home in Killeagh with the family. Cork’s dismembering of Dublin was enjoyed from the couch.

After the final whistle sounded and the handshakes were shown, the camera threw to Joanne and the lads in the corner of where the Hogan meets the Nally. Bellowing in the background and clearly audible over the post-match chat was their song and Cork’s adopted anthem for this latest Liam MacCarthy push.

“It was loud enough that you could hear it anywhere. And again, that shook me a little bit. I've just been, I guess, pleasantly surprised both times. I try not to think about it too much because it would make your head spin. But I'm very grateful to be a part of something that people have taken such pride in. It's a beautiful thing,” continued the 28-year-old bassist.

Eoin Fitzgibbon hurled for Killeagh for 20 years. Suffered an injury when he was 20 and never fully recommitted after that. His last outing was a junior game three or four years ago.

It was at some point last summer that a friend reached out and requested he pen a song in ode to the green and white. The friend’s logic was that the club had a right good junior team for 2024, there was a good chance they’d go all the way, and, if they did, he wanted to be able to sing a song of their own.

“I regrettably made a bet at the time, after a few pints, that if they got to the final I'd write the song. And lo and behold, in October they got to the East Cork Junior final. So my friend reached out again and said, ‘you better get writing that song’.” 

The Kingfishr trio were bunkered down in Dundalk’s Black Mountain Studio recording their first album when payment for the bet was sought. Eoin roped in Eddie (Keogh, lead vocalist) and they had most of the song magicked up in 15 minutes. Eoghan ‘McGoo’ McGrath joined the impromptu songwriting session shortly after and helped the pair apply the finishing touches.

“It was about 20 minutes all in. Some of them take hours upon hours to write, some we've been working on for the last 18 months and still haven’t finished. This just felt so normal, so natural. We didn’t think anything about it because it was just a song we were writing for friends. We never planned on releasing it, never planned on doing anything with it.

“We recorded a video of us playing it and sent it on WhatsApp over to your man and my brother. They started sharing it after Killeagh won the East Cork, then everyone started sharing it. Come December, we'd kind of been given no choice, we were like, we'll have to put this thing out on Spotify.” 

Fitz admits to being initially uncertain about releasing Killeagh out into the streaming-sphere. He repeatedly asked himself why anyone else would be interested in this song about my local parish. It was for Killeagh ears only.

It took him a minute to realise that the song resonated far beyond the East Cork village.

“It is about community, and that sense of community can be very special. I played with Killeagh for 20 years. Hurling, to me, was more than just a sport. It's community, and not to go too far into it, but the last line 'Bury me with my hurley by the River Dissour', we were dwelling on the fact that, anyone part of the GAA that I know that's died, the entire club will give them a guard of honour dressed in Killeagh colours as they leave the Killeagh Church and go down the main street towards the graveyard.

Kingfishr on next week's marquee gig: “we'll hope and pray they can do the business on Sunday. And if they do, we would absolutely not say no to having them with us on the night.” 

“And maybe that's part of why it's been successful, people can resonate with that community aspect in the song.

“I was home in Killeagh over the weekend and seeing all the young kids singing it, the pride of place they have over this song being about their community and their parish is a beautiful little thing. It's inspired a younger generation, as well as made an older generation proud. That's a crazy thing to have been involved in.” 

Released last December, Killeagh didn’t quite have Joe Deane’s take off when fed in the corner. It was end of March when the Irish charts top 10 was first cracked. It was May when they celebrated scoring a first ever No.1 single.

So viral and popular has the anthemic number become that they gave it two belts of the hurley at their debut Live at the Marquee outing Wednesday gone.

Kingfishr started out as a supporting act at the 500-capacity Cyprus Avenue in Cork City. Come next Wednesday, they’ll have played to over 10,000 people across two sold-out Marquee gigs. And if Liam MacCarthy happened to be knocking about Leeside, he wouldn’t be asked for a ticket to enter the tent.

“Look, we'll hope and pray they can do the business on Sunday. And if they do, we would absolutely not say no to having them with us on the night.” 

In the meantime, there’s the small matter of figuring out how to be present at the final and still arrive on time for their Sunday evening show at the Galway International Arts Festival.

“I think it would be a shame to miss a moment of the song being played out over the PA in a stadium of 82,000 and being sung by whatever fans end up singing it. Cork fans have certainly taken it on, but it's been adopted by the whole of Ireland. It would be a special moment we wouldn’t want to miss.”

The decision to hand in his notice at Carrigtwohill’s Rockwell Automation six months after he, Eddie, and 'McGoo', a native of final opponents Tipp, all graduated from the same UL course in 2022 has proven a wise one.

“It's a privilege every day that I get to do this as my job with my two friends.” 

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