Pillow Queens: Band reveal earliest memories as they get set to perform at Beyond the Pale at the Glendalough Estate

“A gay band? Are you political? Pick one.”

“I was like, we don’t have to,” she remembered. “We can be all of these things.”

Blending great, genre-breaking music — ‘Holy Show’, ‘Be By Your Side’, ‘Hearts & Minds’, ‘Handsome Wife’ and ‘Liffey’ — and LGBTQ+activism, Pillow Queens are post-punk auteurs of a new, post-Catholic Ireland.

It is new Ireland of inclusion, diversity, pronouns and where feeling not okay is okay. And where dancing your socks off to songs about being yourself, whoever you are be — Queer, Lesbian, Non-binary, Femme, Butch, Cisgender, Transgender, Transitioning Pan, Gay or Heterosexual — is very much okay too.

The internationally feted quartet are Lyons (drums, vocals), Cathy McGuinness (guitar, vocals), Pamela Connolly (bass, guitar, lead vocals) and Sarah Corcoran (guitar, bass, lead vocals.) The Guardian proclaimed them “2020's most exciting indie-rockers.” There’s more to them than indie-rock, of course. It is more nuanced on so many levels.

‘Rats’ from their debut EP Calm in 2016 was a classic. On it, they sang: ‘You're hungry for hearts, but my humour is tasteless/Sell me myself, while I'm sober/Feed me fun 'til the fallacy's over.’

‘I wanna take you with me to wash and dry your feet,’ they sang on the their post-Catholic masterpiece ‘Liffey’. ‘God give me glory or don't.’

In 2017, they supported Russian feminist militants Pussy Riot at the Button Factory in Dublin. James Vincent McMorrow described their 2018 track ‘Favourite’ as his song of the year “ by a mile.”

That same year, Lyons told Una Mullally in the Irish Times: “For people to be able to see themselves in you, in your performance, that’s important. Relatability is important . When we were growing up, obviously there were women to look up to, but they were so inaccessible. They were on this other level. They weren’t me. They weren’t experiencing the same thing as me. They were famous people.”

RTÉ’s Other Voices called 2019 ‘Gay Girls’ “an instant queer anthem.” It was also nominated for the RTÉ Choice Music Prize song of the year.

In 2021, James Corden had them on his Late Late Show on CBS in America where he called Waiting “one of the best albums of 2020.”

Proudly queer, the band’s mantra is, the personal is political. They protested against Ireland’s Direct Provision system for asylum seekers, played live with the words “End DP” written in large letters on their guitars.

McGuinness also worked for Focus Ireland for three years.

“The way we interact with politics is our everyday,” Corcoran told the Guardian’s Tara McEvoy in 2020. “There have been great advances in Ireland: we’ve had equal marriage come in, we voted to repeal the eighth amendment, so abortion has been legislated for. These things look good on paper…It’s frustrating to live in a country that’s only looking after a minority of people who are already doing OK.”

They are one of the headliners tomorrow night at the Beyond The Pale festival in Glendalough (followed later by the one and only Grace Jones.) It will be one of the gigs of the year by a country mile, to paraphrase James Vince McMorrow.

Pillow Queens sat down with Independent.ie ahead of their big headline show tomorrow in Wicklow. (They are also the very special guests of Franz Ferdinand at Collins Barracks on August 27.)

Emma, who grew up in Donaghmede in North Dublin, can remember climbing out of her cot as a young child, finding a bottle of Calpol and “chugging it down.”

Originally from Kill in Kildare, Rachel says her earliest childhood memory is being sung to sleep by her mother Jennifer drinking “a bottle of very weak, milk-y tea.”

Cathy who is Arklow in Wicklow has fond memories as a young child in her granny and grand-dad’s house on Saturday mornings. All the women in the family would be sitting around a small table drinking tea with the light sun-light streaming in through the windows.

“The light was very particular in my granny’s kitchen,” she says. “I can still see it.”

Her granddad, who was an artist, “would be just existing in the peripherals. He was very much present, but he wasn’t involved in the conversation. He’d be listening to opera and drawing

“He was a carpenter as well, so there would always be sawdust and a real distinctive smell to this workstation.”

From Finglas, Sarah says her earliest memory is of losing her memory. Her auntie would mind her around the corner when her mother Rose Marie was at work. She had recently learned to buckle her toe. She was proud that she could do it without help from anyone.

One day while playing chasing on the estate while her auntie watched, she bent down to adjust her shoe buckle when disaster struck.

One of the girls in the chasing game tripped over Sarah and landed on her.

“I hit my head and I lost my memory.”

She was three years of age, nearly four. When her auntie brought her home, she started getting sick. Her mother rushed home from work went into Temple Street Hospital in an ambulance with her. Sarah was frightened by the sirens, because the noise was so loud – “especially when you’re a child.”

Sarah and her three unaffected soulmates will be walking to the main stage in Glendalough tomorrow at 6pm.

Expect nothing less than a triumphant performance that will resonate across the Wicklow mountains all the way to Finglas.

• Pillow Queens will be performing at Beyond the Pale at Glendalough Estate, Sunday, June 18.