The Billboard album chart is a bit like the Premiership. It’s the same old faces with the mega-bucks backing scuffling about for the top spots. Flogging Molly’s Float landing at number four is a bit like Sunderland knocking the crap out of the big boys. Except that Flogging Molly deserve it on the basis of overwhelming talent more than Roy Keane’s assortment of Man Utd rejects and Irish reserves ever could.

When frontman Dave King was struggling against major labels in the early days of his career with Fastway and Katmandu, he never could have imagined these levels of success with a band that mixes Irish trad with breakneck punk, signed to SideOneDummy, a mighty minnow in the leagues of record labels.

“To see us at the top of the charts in America is overwhelming,” says King, “But we have put a lot of work into this and we’ve been touring for ten years. I think people in Ireland and Europe are probably thinking ‘what the fuck is that all about?’ but we have under our belts the touring that we’ve done, in America in particular. I know the newspapers have been saying things like ‘band tops charts in America, unknown back home’ but there’s been a lot of graft and hard work involved.”

When King talks about hard work, he doesn’t use the term lightly. Flogging Molly tour almost endlessly, playing in excess of 200 shows most years. It is inevitable that each run must become wearing, but the band somehow battle their way through.

“We were just sitting here talking about that,” says King, “because we’re pretty much booked up till the end of the year and we’re trying to keep our sanity. We knew it was going to be a busy year with the new album out and we haven’t had one out in so long. “We just do our best to try and keep our heads together. We’re just at the start of the tour so we’re a bit all over the fucking place but once we get into a bit of a routine it’ll go well.”

The tour might be just starting out but it’s been difficult already for the septet. “We had our bus parked outside our show in Stockholm,” says King, “and the truck got broken into and Bridget got all her fiddles stolen. So that was a fucking bummer. We met a very nice man who makes fiddles and we borrowed a fiddle off him that she’s using right now. So we’re trying to get back into our stride because the shows themselves have been going great. I mean, crowd-wise and stuff like that they’ve been great. We’re just waiting for a new set of fiddles to be sent from America and we’ll be back on track.”

The tour is headed for London on 31 May and then on to a riotous climax when the band reach Dublin in early June.
“The only fucking bummer,” says King, “is that myself and Bridget, we live in Wexford and we thought that we didn’t have any dates for five or so days after the show. Our whole village is coming up for the show so we thought we’d be going back in the bus with them but unfortunately we’ve got to fly out to San Francisco the next fucking day. I’m really looking forward to Dublin though. Apparently it’s sold out already, which is fucking unbelievable.”

For the band’s chart-raiding latest album Float, the five members of Flogging Molly still based in America moved to Ireland for the duration of the writing and recording processes. “We were looking for a new place to do an album besides America,” says King, “As me and Bridget were in Ireland anyway, we said, well why not come over here? So we rented a few cottages in the place where we live and wrote the album and then went to Grouse Lodge in County Westmeath. The studio itself was fucking unbelievable and the atmosphere was great. We all lived together and ate together every night. We did something we’d never done before.

Instead of setting up and doing three or four backing tracks a day, we’d do one song complete a day. That was really interesting, going in at about 12 o’clock and putting a backing track down, patching up the other instruments, doing the vocals, backing vocals and having it almost 100% finished. It meant we were focused on one thing.”

Only two days before I talk to King on the phone from Lund, my research leads me to a painfully obvious port-of-call: the band’s profile on Wikipedia. The latest entry confuses me for all of five minutes until I work out exactly how much truth it contains. According to the entry, Dave King is due to retire after the band’s Dublin gig and will be replaced by a young Irish musician. The same person is also credited with currently providing backing vocals for the band. Dave King’s reaction is one of bewildered amusement. He laughs: “I don’t even know what you’re talking about! I did an interview with Kerrang the other day and the lad asked me if was I retiring after Dublin. I was like, ‘what the fuck is going on?’ What would we be doing with a tour schedule like this if I’m retiring? I don’t use a computer but Bridey does. I’ll get her to go on and take care of that. For fuck’s sake. People have nothing better to do!”

The most apparent thing when talking to Dave King is how little his accent has faded since he emigrated to America.

He sounds as if he never left Dublin. Now he has returned to Ireland with his new wife Bridget Regan, who plays fiddle in the band and the couple have made their home in a small village in County Wexford on the southeast coast.

Being removed from the powder keg political climate in America and back in an altered version of the country of his birth allowed King the opportunity to delve a little deeper with the lyrics on Float.

“Ireland, compared to how it was when I left, is a completely different place,” he says, “It was great for writing lyrics for the album. Myself and Bridget, we’re not able to vote in America so we decided to vote with our feet and we moved back to Ireland. George Bush brought America to its fucking knees with this mindless fucking so-called war that he’s embroiled everybody in and it’s very sad to see that. That was to the forefront of my mind, especially with songs like ‘Lightning Storm’ and ‘Requiem For A Dying Song’.

"America is a fantastic country and it’s incredible how one man can drag it down to the fucking bottom. Especially when you look at Ireland and see the mindless violence that was happening there for centuries and we have finally gotten our teeth around that.

“Me and Bridget, we love to drive up to Belfast and hang out and go to pubs and restaurants and stuff like that. You never could have done that in 1989. It’s fucking great and it’s very optimistic. Even though there are political undertones to the situation we find ourselves in, there’s still a lot of hope there. Hopefully, come November we’ll have a bit of a change in America. We might not be able to vote but we still have our ‘Irish for Obama’ t-shirts. That’s the ticket we’re on.”