On a wet and windy night in County Kerry, the best new group in Ireland are playing their smallest show in four years. Over the previous two evenings, the indie-rock four-piece Inhaler performed to 2,500 hometown fans in Dublin; their last London show, in October, was at the 3,300-capacity Roundhouse. Now, here they are in Dingle, playing to 68 people. In a church. Where did it all go wrong, already?
“Yeah!” laughs singer and guitarist Elijah ‘Eli’ Hewson. “We peaked last night in Dublin!”
Inhaler have been through a heavy few months’ touring, and are going straight into the promotion for next month’s release, Cuts & Bruises. Recorded in Willesden’s Narcissus Studio, it’s the lean, urgent follow-up to 2021’s debut album It Won’t Always Be Like This, a chart-topper in the UK and Ireland.
Even if they’re a classic, party-loving guitar band, surely they should really be taking it easy, and not schlepping all the way to the Dingle Peninsula for a six-song set to a few dozen people.
But over 21 years, Dingle’s Other Voices arts festival has built an outsized reputation for championing young Irish artists and pulling in international big-hitters. And the town’s St James Church is the event’s spiritual hub, scene of one of Amy Winehouse’s most legendary gigs in 2006.
“To be asked to play The Church was an honour,” says Hewson, Guinness in hand, as he and his hungover bandmates – Josh Jenkinson (guitar), Robert Keating (bass), Ryan McMahon (drums) – wind down after their set. It would have been grand for the singer’s parents to witness that honour. But, well, Bono and Ali Hewson are otherwise engaged: this weekend they’re in Washington DC, where U2 are receiving a Kennedy Centre Honour for their “contribution to American culture through the performing arts”. So there’s that.
The second youngest of the couple’s four children is keenly aware of the challenge of following the man born Paul Hewson into the family business.
“I didn’t want to sing,” the 23-year-old says, speaking of the early days of Inhaler, who formed as a school band at Dublin’s private St Andrew’s College. “It’s a lot of pressure. It’s exposing, and you feel like a knob! And with the auld lad singing, I thought: ‘Oh, I can’t be doing that...’” he laughs, ruffling a haircut that makes him the spit of the auld lad as shown – in his younger days – on the cover of his brilliant recent memoir, Surrender.
But when they were 14 or 15, after an early member of the line-up, nominally the singer, bottled his vocals, Hewson found himself centre stage. But as Jenkinson points out, “leading just came out very naturally” for Hewson. “Your drive came from you being great at songwriting,” McMahon chips in. “Once you were writing songs, you were like: ‘I know how this should sound.’”
Inhaler have been together for a decade, all four foreswearing college after school, intent on making a go of the band. Hewson admits his mum, who’s been with his dad since their own school days, was wary of another male close to her running off to join the rock’n’roll circus.
“She hated it,” he says. “Then as she saw how passionate I was about it, and about the lads, she had no choice but to get on board.” Now Ali Hewson is “very supportive”, but there are limits. “Our first time coming to London, our Airbnb got cancelled. I rang her: ‘Any chance of a hotel?’ She said: ‘When me and your dad first went over to London, we had to stay on a park bench one night. So, do that.’”
Luckily, a mate came through with a couch. But mum had made her point. “Certainly I had a very privileged upbringing,” says the easygoing Hewson, a celebrity offspring who knows there’s no point in playing down or refusing to engage with his parentage. “So the moments where they can put me through challenges like that, they do.”
Inhaler have undoubtedly slogged their way through their fair share of pub and club gigs. Still, as they began to do interviews two years ago, Hewson acknowledged that they’re inevitably in the shadow of the biggest four-piece rock band in the world. How does he feel now?
“I don’t know if we’re stepping out of theirs, I just think our shadow’s just getting bigger,” he says.
“But even with that, we don’t feel the shadow of U2,” adds Keating. “It’s just a fact. Of course we’re in U2’s shadow. Any Irish band is – Fontaines [DC] are. Unfortunately, Eli’s f***ing dad happens to be in the band with the big shadow!”
Hewson grins. “He’s actually quite a small lad in person. I’ve got a bigger shadow!”
Last week, we talked again. Inhaler had just landed from New York, where they’d filmed a performance for Late Night with Seth Meyers. A couple of hours later, Hewson is on the roof of his sister Jordan’s flat in Swiss Cottage, smoking a homemade cigarette so fat that I fancy I can smell it through the Zoom.
Since we last spoke, the “nepo baby” conversation, about the privileges of nepotism enjoyed by the performing offspring of artists, has gone viral after an American magazine story. Hewson’s sister Eve, an actress who was one fo the stand-outs in Sharon Horgan’s Apple TV+ comedy-drama Bad Sisters, has had some social media fun with the accusations.
“Actually pretty devastated I’m not featured in the nepo baby article like haven’t they seen my hit show Bad Sisters???” she tweeted. “The NERVE.”
“She loves getting involved in it. But I’m a very mini nepo baby,” her little brother says, smiling and exhaling smoke. “It doesn’t bother me, man. It doesn’t change the fact that I want to do music, and that it’s what I love.
“You just have to wear your advantages on your sleeve, because there are a lot of them,” he adds. “But they don’t mean that people are gonna listen to your music or come to your gigs.” Or, indeed, give you a number one album.
He’s equally relaxed with the fact that, whatever the haircut similarities at any given time, he’s unavoidably going to sound like dad – a fact driven home on the new, stripped-back version of Pride (In The Name of Love) that U2 release the day before we speak as the lead single from Surrender, a compilation to accompany the auld lad’s autobiography.
“It’s always funny when people go: ‘My God, he sounds just like his dad.’ Or: ‘He looks just like his dad.’ Yeah, I came out of his f*cking…” he trails off, laughing, mindful that mum might be reading. “So I’m definitely at peace with that. It’s not a bad thing to sound like Bono.”
