CRANKY GEORGE

Cranky George first came together when James Fearnley (co-founder and accordionist for the London-Irish folk-punk band, The Pogues) and the Mulroney brothers, Kieran and Dermot (violin-and cello-playing siblings from a large, Irish-American family from Alexandria, VA), became neighbours in Hollywood, California.

While he is better known as an actor in films such as My Best Friend’s Wedding, About Schmidt and The Grey, Dermot is also an accomplished musician. As a cellist, he’s classically trained with many years’ experience in both the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra and in Academy Award-winner Michael Giacchino’s scoring orchestra in Hollywood. As a mandolin player and guitarist, he’s unrestrained, injecting mischief into each song with unsparing invention.

For more than thirty years, James has been The Pogues’ accordion player, multi-instrumentalist and string arranger, as well as a composer for film and theatre. He is also an acclaimed memoirist. His lyrical and candid book about his life with the Pogues, Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues, was published in 2012 by Faber in the United Kingdom and by Chicago Review Press in the United States. James’s demoniacal dexterity on the typewriter can be heard in his accordion playing on Fat Lot of Good along with his verve as a pianist and the brutal constancy of his time keeping as a guitarist.

Like his brother Dermot, Kieran is a classically trained musician specialising in four-stringed instruments - violin, ukuleles and tenor guitar. While Dermot’s place is on the screen, Kieran’s is behind it – a screenwriter of wide repute having written (and directed) the independent film Paperman and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. While Kieran’s violin is sensuous and liquid on Fat Lot of Good, his ukulele playing is watertight. As a founding member of and lead vocal-arranger for Columbia University’s seminal a cappella group, The Kingsmen, his voice is by turns pleading and excoriating.

In 1994 the three were founding members of the Los Angeles band The Low and Sweet Orchestra which fastened a string-and-accordion section to the traditional format of drums, bass, guitar and vocals. They released the acclaimed album Goodbye To All That on Interscope Records in 1996. A couple of years after, The Low and Sweet Orchestra split up and the Mulroneys and Fearnley formed The Cranky George Trio, recording an EP of original material augmented by mandolin, guitar and ukulele. They played a series of live shows which incorporated foot-operated percussion and a hatbox bass drum. In time, the trio added Brad Wood on bass. After a couple of years, Sebastian Sheehan Visconti was drafted in as percussionist.

All-round musician Brad Wood’s producing career began in 1988 as co-owner of the storied recording studio Idful Music Corporation in Chicago’s Wicker Park and continued with the establishment of Seagrass Studio in North Hollywood. Brad has been the producer of over a hundred records including such artists as Ben Lee, Veruca Salt, The Bangles, Pete Yorn and Liz Phair. Brad’s bass playing plies a line between James Jamerson and Andy Fraser while his hatbox bass drum is the pulsing heartbeat of the band.

Sebastian Sheehan Visconti is a sound designer and sound effects editor in the Los Angeles film industry, notably for television series such as The Muppets, The Flash and the upcoming The Mick, as well as a musician, drummer and percussionist whose sense of punctuation and dynamics is directly related to his skills as a sound editor.

A perfect foil to the effervescence of the musicianship in Cranky George are the band’s blend of vocal harmonies; its cross-graining voices of James’s chiselly drone, the honeyed timbre of Sebastian’s voice, Brad’s incisive falsetto, the Mulroney brothers’ baritones