Bob Vylan at Vicar Street on Wednesday 26th November 2025
Sometimes gig line ups seem like a thrown together collection of bands. Other times they feel like something laden, purposefully of course, with deep connection. Bob Vylan and Meryl Streek are both poignantly and aggressively angry with their own governments, and deliver that message in sharp and clever language. They both mix personal experience and no little dingy sentimentality with bitterly punchy poetry.
Both perform punk in a less traditional sense, in that they have heavy rap influences, and are backed with, simplistically, drums and a booming pre-recorded soundsystem backdrop. Hell, both are even named for slightly oddball twists household names. Tonight’s setup, an angry musical evisceration of the British and Irish status quo in almost every measure apart from how the two places link together, makes a tremendous amount of sense.
Meryl Streek is a rising star of the Irish music scene producing work of truly cutting beauty, leaning heavily on his personal malcontent with the government and society’s approach to the working class. One suspects he wouldn’t mind a little bit of the controversy Bob Vylan has been faced with: a charmingly mild-mannered man off stage, Dave’s work nonetheless has a furious political poignancy, one that’s at its best when he’s at his most personal.
Meryl Streek at Vicar Street on 26 November 2025 by Méabh Bourke
Take ‘Paddy’ an ode to his late uncle who seems to have been one of those Dublin characters, feeling, so far as we can tell through gorgeously evocative lyrics, simultaneously quick-witted and sozzled, supremely sociable and a little lost. The crowd are led in a chant of “and you’ll always be remembered, and you’ll always be missed” through the heart of the track, and somehow, Paddy is brought to life in a way that feels almost like it represents the soul of Meryl Streek’s Coolock community.
The more overtly political numbers don’t miss, either. Like Bob Vylan, Meryl Streek has a habit of making use of news clips in his music. He opens exploring homelessness, which is laid firmly at the feet of the government, moving on to landlordism, the church, and the hopeless-feeling uphill drudgery facing modern day 20-somethings as the set progresses. Throughout it all, he strides purposefully from side to side, like a man too riddled with fury to stand still.
Later, he splits the crowd entirely in two, charging from the front of the venue to the back as his message punch just as deep. As the man himself says, the last time he was on the Vicar Street was a full 15 years ago, as the drummer in a support act for The Jesus And Mary Chain. His current project is very different, and dare we say emphatically more interesting: a firm punch up from a man who gets in your face to deliver his message, then doesn’t waste a word.
Bob Vylan at Vicar Street on 26 November 2025 by Méabh Bourke
Of course, Bob Vylan don’t seem to go anywhere or do anything without causing a stir these days. In the UK, they’re becoming a pain in the political classes’ collective arses; a regular hate symbol for those who, if reactions say anything, seem to believe actual deaths matter less than hurty words delivered from a festival stage.
In a single day in Dublin, they drop in on the Dáil with Sinn Féin and then declare they’ve been snubbed by Fine Fáil and Fine Gael in the halls. They attend a pro-Palestinian protest. They playfully stick the Councillors who tried to have this gig cancelled on the guest list, and criticise the British government alongside a picture taken in front of the Irish Proclamation of Independence. They’re simply taking a different route to making that political noise away from home.
The pair have done their homework: they know Ireland is, in the main, emphatically pro-Palestine. They know they can safely criticise the government in front of their particular crowd, and that there is a housing crisis, though they make several jokes about wanting to move here anyway. They have to double check that Shannon is an airport mid-set, but by and large, they’ve made the effort needed to place themselves politically in an Irish context, and that feels important.
And wow, are the two Bobs likeable. They are greeted, on first appearance, with the kind of cheer that’s normally reserved for the end of a second encore containing a smash hit single, and open by taking us through a kind of lively meditative yoga routine set to some heady guitars. From there, things get brilliantly and unapologetically hostile towards the upper echelons of society, whilst simultaneously loving towards their adoring crowd.
Personalised anti-racism anthem ‘We Live Here’ is dropped early, a visceral first-person battering of ingrained prejudice that’s followed by ‘Makes Me Violent’, a – listen carefully, tabloid guests – anti-violence anthem. Vylan crowdsurfs almost from the off and drapes a crowd-proferred flag in favour of direct action against the US military in Shannon over their chunky amps.
In amongst the chaos, there’s a surprising amount of joking and contemplative pauses. “Our shows are half talking, half music. We have to explain context, apparently,” they proclaim. They deliver powerful leftist positions in regular quickfire speeches, branding Daman Albarn a prick for talking about their “goose stepping” (wrong side, Damon), and holding up Public Enemy’s Chuck D as a supportive inspiration.
Local hero, Karla Chubb of Sprints steps on stage to deliver Amy Taylor (of Amyl and The Sniffer’s) vocals on ‘Dream Bigger’, with Bobby smiling behind her as she somehow lays down an even higher level of intensity than him, belting through lines like “I once had a dream like Bob, said I don’t want to work no job, I wanna get rich and shake my arse, and now I travel round the world, economy class….. Dream big, kid, dream big”
The highlights keep coming. Can Ireland offer political asylum? Elvis is a racist. A new track, unnamed (or perhaps it’s called ‘Slam Dunk’), but referencing The Offspring and heavy even by Vylan’s standards. ‘Pretty Songs’ (“blah blah… I’d rather fight”). A rare, brief slow moment.
If the establishment have chosen an enemy in Bob Vylan – and it certainly feels like an element of the politically engaged have – we don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest they haven’t made the wisest call. These two have the wit and prose to put across an articulate and memorable view, the DIY ethos to know it won’t cost them more than they stand to gain, and the intellect to make them a tough target to beat.
Lines like “we heard you want your country back? Shut the fuck up” are the product not of sweaty loutishness, but of an ear for a slogan that gets a legitimate point across, slammed into the heart with hard hitting lefty sentiment.
As frontman Bobby told Louis Theroux in pretty much his only media appearance since that Glastonbury moment (and yes, we had to get there eventually)… sometimes saying something catchy and a little over the top (we paraphrase) is how you get people talking about something.
We don’t want to talk about “Death, death to the IDF” particularly. It’s a chant repeated in Vicar Street throughout, by the by, with the band eventually conceding to joining in (“you might have seen we’ve been in a bit of trouble. We don’t know the laws here,” they say as they initially refuse to say the words themselves, but they soon give in, to massive cheers).
We don’t want to talk about it, not because it’s not valid to criticise that organisation, even with a little hyperbole. It clearly is. The problem is that to focus on it too much diminishes this band. What about listening to a deeply-personal anti-racism diatribe that references Stephen Lawrence? Hell, what about that most famous of political touchpoints, freedom of speech?
In some senses, becoming a political football has made this band what they are. In another sense, it hides their true depth. Bob Vylan are quite brilliant performers, but more than that, they’re brilliantly effective spokespeople, too. This show is thought provoking, angry, personal, effortlessly engaging, and intelligent. And it’s all delivered with a knowing smile.
Forget the headlines, telling as they have been, Respect the edgy quality grounded in personal reality, the snarling turn of phrase, and the utterly pulsating stage presence instead. After all, this cuts deep, and it feels like it means everything to them. It’s also entirely what punk was always for.
