Dandy: new single from Dublin post-punk power poppers The Prongs
Lords of the New Wave, Dublin post-punk lit-rockers The Prongs are delighted to announce the release of their brand new single, Hey! Dandy, due out on November 1st.
After a year of intensive creativity, BBC Radio Six darlings The Prongs bring you this eagerly awaited new song as a taster of their forthcoming second album. Hey! Dandy follows on from last year’s British Broadcasting Corporation-busting Psychogeography release and 2023’s highly acclaimed Theme from The Now Now Express.
Hey! Dandy is a blistering new single. Niall Toner Jr. channels the ghosts of Mott the Hoople, Big Star, The Saints, The Stones and Magazine as John Fleming vocalises his vivid lyrics as a twisted body double for TS Elliot. Hey! Dandy is a sociopoetic portrait of Ireland’s early-1970s velvet (coat) revolution. The infectious beat and striking words sketch the trajectory of young blades who left Ireland not as migrants but Byronic adventurers on a pre-EEC beatnik grand tour. Escaping monochromatic economic dourness and pervasive poverty of the mind, these brave vagabonds set off not in search of work but European adventure. After stints in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Madrid, our Hey! Dandy pioneers returned to Dublin circa 1972 fuelled with sharp new tastes and revolutionary ideas. Their culture found form in the Dandelion Market. Part-fiction, part-fact, Hey! Dandy’s epic narrative sweep is propelled by the swagger of early-1970s proto-punk rock. Hey! Dandy unearths an EEC prehistory often forgotten in later Irish punk rock and new wave countercultural triumphs.
“One way ticket/The rule of thumb/You left Berlin at dawn/And you hitchhiked to Rome/Wearing winklepickers and your Kraut officer coat/Eating Bombay samosas and neglecting to vote… Dandelion Dandies/They came back/Dandelion Dandies/Poised for punk rock attack”
In a stylish Dandelion Market time tunnel video by Susan Gleeson (shot at a convincingly fake junk retail outlet at the Digital Hub Flea Market), The Prongs set out their Hey! Dandy punk beatnik stall. To celebrate the release, The Prongs play a show at Dublin’s Grand Social on November 15th with very special guests from Cork, Big Boy Foolish.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dubliners John Fleming and Niall Toner Jr. have been friends since their teenage years. Fleming is an award-winning radio dramatist who has written half a dozen radio plays broadcast by RTE and BBC, along with other forms of fiction including the critically acclaimed novel The Now Now Express. Toner Jr is a renowned musician, songwriter and soundscape designer who has played and toured in bands since the 1980s such as Those Handsome Devils, The Dixons, The Cajun Kings and Strand. The Prongs is a kaleidoscopic meeting of the two men’s talents, hearts and minds with Toner Jr writing and producing the music and Fleming writing and vocalising the lyrics.
The Prongs have played acclaimed headline shows at The Project Arts Centre (2023 and 2025), the Button Factory, Whelan’s, The Grand Social, Altogether Now festival and the London Irish Centre in Camden. Most recently they played to rapturous applause at the Electric Picnic.
Prongs kingpins Fleming and Toner are nearing the completion of their Dave Clifford-directed Celtique-noir gangster feature film The Unlikely Assassination of a Saint featuring Eamon Carr and many luminaries of the Dublin punk rock scene.
LINKS:
Download The Prongs music on Bandcamp
