The Beards in Whelan’s

The Beards in Whelan’s, Dublin, 21st of February 2014

“This next song is all about beards.”

The humble beard has always been an inseparable part of music. Everyone knows that the notoriously clean-shaven Beatles were better when they copped on and grew themselves some beards, don’t they?

It was only a matter of time before some brave and bearded individuals came along and took this connection one step further, dedicating their entire repertoire of songs to the celebration – bordering on religious fervour – of impressive facial hair.

If you were in the general vicinity of Wexford Street last night you may have noticed a greater concentration of bearded men outside Whelan’s than usual. That’s because Australian pogonophiles The Beards were in town.

Rocking their rambunctious way through the aptly titled ‘Euro-bout To Grow A Beard’ Tour, the antipodean arch-rivals of shaving made their Dublin debut to a packed out main room. The gig had initially been booked for Whelan’s upstairs, but the sheer unquenchable love of beards couldn’t be contained and necessitated the promotion to the bigger stage.

Warm up act EleventyFour may have been conspicuously un-bearded, but that didn’t stop her drawing a few laughs out of the audience of beer-drinking beardies with her quirky brand of relentlessly cheerful acoustic comedy songs. The lack of actual facial hair did nothing to diminish EleventyFour’s obvious approval of The Beard’s almost militant pro-beard agenda.

In an unprecedented turn of events, The Beards took to the stage with a song on one of their lesser-covered topics. I Like Beards is a rousing rock ‘n’ roll anthem that united the bearded and un-bearded members of the audience alike in an unequivocal celebration of cheek fuzz.

No Beard, No Good took the show in a completely different direction, attacking the social malady of bare chins. The Beards are nothing if not a band with a very clearly defined social conscience.

The Beards are as multifaceted as they are musically inventive. Their hirsute set flowed from stripped back folk/blues numbers (The Beard Accessory Store) to driving piano ballads (Born with a Beard). Lyrically their songs are a veritable bearded bible of advice for the modern day cultivator of facial fur.

The melancholy piano ballad Shaved off his Beard is a profound warning against the evils of the razor, as well as a soul-searching rumination on the enduring place of the beard in hard rock (“Well there once was a band/ and their name was Kings of Leon/ they shaved off their beards/ and now they’re shit”).

Not content with merely stroking each other’s impressive chin rugs between choruses (and the occasional impromptu sax-solo), The Beards also took time to celebrate the multitude of impressively hairy members of the audience. John McNally of the of The Irish Beard and Moustache Association (whose waist length beard would put Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top to shame), was invited on stage and presented with a trophy for best beard of the night.

Shaggy-faced frontman Johann Beardraven also took a moment to explain the bearded revolution that his band have spawned, “Everyone is Australia now has a beard.” In order to convert their Irish fans to similar levels of beard-love, the bearded bards closed their show with a song directed at “all the ladies in the house.”

You Should Consider Having Sex with a Bearded Man channels the wild abandon of ’80s rock, keytar and all, with the word ‘consider’ and genuine humility of the message keeping the track from degenerating into Mötley Crüe levels of sleaze. Maybe the Crüe’s problem was that they didn’t have beards.

The bearded revolution is here to stay, try to take a razor to it and it will just grow back thicker and more powerful than before. It’s clear that The Beards won’t stop until “everyone in Europe – nay, the universe – has grown a beard.”

For more information on The Beard’s philosophical theory on the virtues of beardliness, check out our interview with the band here.