The Murder Capital can't wait for big moment at the Iveagh Gardens

Sunday World

22-05-2025

While BIMM was their third level education, The Murder Capital earned their Masters touring with the legendary Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.
The Murder Capital singer and songwriter James McGovern tells how Joe Wall of The Stunning played a role in encouraging him to become a frontman in the band.
As the group gets set to play Dublin's Iveagh Gardens in July, James also tells Shuffle that he's totally at home in his role as the singer in the band.
'I feel being on stage is a very natural place for me to be,' James says. 'There's never a nervousness…I enjoy it in the way I enjoy eating food. One of the things we never want to do is go through the motions.'
It was while in Dublin's BIMM music college, where The Murder Capital originated, that lecturer Joe Wall suggested that James had frontman potential.
'We were doing a cover of Chris Isaack's Wicked Games and I was playing the rhythm guitar and singing,' James recalls.
'I don't know what he saw that day, but he pulled me aside and said, 'I think there's a frontman in you and just consider that.' It wasn't like some moment of revelation for the two of us. So I did and here I am now.'
Back with a new album, Blindness, The Murder Capital tell how the benefited from their college days in BIMM.
'I would definitely recommend BIMM to anyone going into music as a career,' bassist Gabriel Blake says. 'The education we got in those four years to focus on being a musician is invaluable, including the business side of being in a band. The lecturers are the lifeblood of that college."
The Murder Captial.
'And if it wasn't for BIMM we would have had to rely on fate bringing the five of us together. I guess the reason we got off the ground so quickly is because when the five of us were in the room together there was a collective decision made to rehearse more because there were so many bands around us further down the road and we wanted to get up to that level.
'In the early days of the band we rehearsed from 10am to 5pm every day. We gave up our jobs to just focus on it and really hope that it was going to work out. And that determination and that focus that we had collectively paid off.'
While BIMM was their third level education, The Murder Capital earned their Masters touring with the legendary Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.
James says: 'Nick was unbelievable…what an unbelievable performer and a very generous spirit who took the time to invite us in for dinner, listened to our record (Blindness) and told us what he thought about the record. Nick is a very open book kind of person and truly born to do it as a performer. The whole band was so sweet and kind. The education we got was invaluable.'
The band are forward to their concert at The Iveagh Gardens on Saturday, July 19, with pent up excitement.
'With this album we had to do something special in Ireland,' Gabriel says. 'The birthplace of the band was Dublin when we were in college together and the Iveagh Gardens always felt like a moment for a band, even if it was a band coming from overseas. So we're very excited.'
James, who watched Fontaines DC in action at the Iveragh Gardens, adds: 'It contains some amount of energy in it. I couldn't believe the energy for an outdoor space because it's hard to always capture that kind of energy. I love theatres and arenas for the way that they contain energy, but it kind of does the same thing. I can't wait to find out what it's like to play it.'