Harvest are dropping by Triskel Arts Centre next week (Sat 16 May) for a powerhouse performance of Neil Young’s hits, so this week, Elysia from Box Office & Marketing sat down with Seán, the band’s front man, for a chat about all things Neil Young, how it felt to be recognised by the rock legend, and what’s in store for Harvest throughout 2026. Tickets to Harvest (a tribute to Neil Young) are available now but with only limited seats remaining.
3 words to describe your music?
Tribute, authentic, exciting.
You formed in 2009, how many of you are original members?
There were four of us originally. What happened was, I went to see Neil Young with my wife and on the way home we were talking about how amazing the show was and I said, “God, I’d love to play some of those songs live”, and she said “well, why don’t you?” I thought it was a brilliant idea. It started with just the four of us playing shows as a four-piece, and then in 2013 Neil Young was playing in Dublin in the RDS so we decided to try expand our ranks to do an extra special show. We got a piano player in, we got a pedal steel guitar in, and Ali, my wife, and another lady came in to do backing vocals and harmonies. So we then became eight, and initially it was intended for just that one gig, but it was so good that they’ve never left the building.
Neil Young’s work is quite broad and he plays bit of everything, a bit of country and some rock, and it was hard to do that justice with just the four of us, so what ended up happening was we’d leave out a chunk of his discography. His material is extremely varied, so when it was just the four of us we were quite limited. I say the word authentic for your first question because that is what we strive for as much as possible. With the proper instrumentation on board it really allowed us to perform as sincerely and as closely to the original as people would be familiar with. The aim for us is to have people leaving the show walk away feeling like it’s exactly how they remember it being played, because there is a touch of nostalgia to this; it’s principally people age 45 and older that come to see our shows, so we do make it our business to meet people after the shows and they often say how they were listening to this stuff growing up themselves and how well we did, which is really gratifying to us because that’s what we do them for: we’re a big band so that we can do these songs justice.
Do you make any changes, lyrically or stylistically, to the songs you perform in the set, or do you prefer total authenticity?
When we’re playing our regular gigs we tend to play them as directly as possible, however Neil famously did an MTV Unplugged back in the 90s where he stripped back all the songs to bare bones, so myself and Dara started doing these shows. Neil himself has done shows before that were literally just him by himself on stage with a microphone, and he plays these songs that would’ve been full-band songs but even stripped back they work really powerfully. We’ve done quite a few of these shows now over the years and they’re quite popular, because it does give us a chance to explore the songs in a different way. With Eugene playing the piano on this show, and with the piano in the Triskel, we said we’d have to do a few of the unplugged ones as well.
Do you all do this cover band as a full-time gig?
This is a gratifying hobby for us. We all have day jobs, but we do this around once per month somewhere in the country. We recently did one in Bilbao in Spain actually, a guy found us online and he liked us so much he whisked us come out to perform at his 50th birthday, which was an amazing experience. We all have our own stuff going on like kids and work now, so we very deliberately settled on once a month because any more than that would be over saturation from a consumer point of view but also from our point of view too, we didn’t want to get to a place where it’s ever a chore or a bore. It’s still really exciting to us! We still can’t believe we get to go out and do this every few weeks together, it’s a great group and a great crew,
Are your kids fans of Neil Young?
Yeah! I’ve two girls and a boy, my youngest girl absolutely loves Neil Young– they’ve been indoctrinated from a young age, clearly — and sometimes when she gets in the car she’ll throw on a Spotify playlist with Neil in there, so I’ve definitely done something right! My oldest isn’t as keen but still will listen, and my son then is fairly indifferent to it, so they’re all different really.
If you weren’t in a Neil Young cover band, what cover band would you form?
I love The Beatles, but they’ve been done to death, there’s so many tribute bands for them. One person I’ve actually found myself listening to a lot lately rather unintentionally is Willie Nelson, so I’m going to go with him I think. He’s an interesting artist; he’s releasing his one hundred and fifty-sixth album this year, and he’s 94 years of age.
Your demographic is mainly people in their fifties and sixties who are into classics and rock; do you feel the need to attract a younger crowd?
They are the people who are interested. I do all the marketing for the band, and I can see the breakdowns of who clicks on the posts and so on, and when you get into the targeted marketing you can see it clearly when you throw the net far and wide; the twenty-somethings have no interest, thirty-somethings a little more, but once you target the forty-somethings and higher you find people with a genuine interest in it. It makes sense because Neil has been making music for decades now and most people would consider that he made his best music in the seventies, and that was fifty years ago now; so anyone who’s going to be in that space is going to be our demographic.
We were doing a show in Limerick a while back, and after the shows we do a little meet and greet to shake hands and kiss babies and all that, which adds to the experiences of the show. We want those people to come away from our shows not only feeling entertained but like they got to meet the people behind the show too, and we do see people commenting about that on our social media so we know people care, and we want them to know we care too, we want to make that connection. So anyway at this show in Limerick I could see this lady hanging around at the end of the queue, deliberately holding back as the rest of the queue was moving so she clearly wanted to say something to us. She came up to me at the end and said her and her husband had fallen in love in Dublin in the seventies listening to Neil Young, and he had recently passed away, so it was equal parts happy and sad for her. She then said oh, by the way my husband is the guitarist of the band Horslips, which was absolutely amazing and just so cool to me. She could’ve just finished watching our gig and gone home, but she didn’t, she loved it and wanted to tell us. It was such a lovely thing to know we had sort of reminded her of the good, sweet times in her life.
We get a lot of people coming up to us to tell us how much it means to them, and it really does mean a lot to me too. I started this band because I love Neil Young music, so it’s nice to have people come up and share their experiences with me.
Neil Young himself has commended Harvest for their performance. How did that feel for you and the band?
Oh, amazing. A few years ago I was out for lunch with a mate of mine in Dublin and he pointed out Neil was turning 80 in 2025, then asked me “what are you going to do, you have to do something spectacular”, and I said “ah yeah I’ll get the RTÉ Orchestra in” and we both started laughing, and then kind of stopped and realised that wasn’t actually a bad idea. The very next day I wrote an email to the RTÉ Orchestra founder and within an hour, their events director got back to me and said it was a wonderful idea that they’d definitely look into. Then about a year ago, they contacted me and said they wanted to go ahead and do it, so we started working on a programme with the orchestra. Meanwhile then a woman called Eimear Crehan who does choirs and the most stunning vocals for everyone from Paul Brady to Glen Hansard, she had seen us playing in the Olympia and wanted to put a choir together for Harvest, and at the time when she contacted me I couldn’t really conceive of a choir playing with us because Neil had never done anything like that with a choir before. I couldn’t resolve what it would sound like. Once the RTÉ Orchestra came on board though, I realised wow, with the choir, the orchestra, and Harvest, that’s the spectacular my mate was on about back at that lunch in Dublin. We worked with the choir on about ten songs, then did about fifteen with the orchestra, and one rehearsal all together before the show.
We got a videographer in to film documentary-style about the process and performance, and he recorded some great footage of the rehearsal but then also video’d the show. We sat down then together and edited a little twenty-minute documentary about it. There’s a guy I know in Germany who does research for Neil Young’s management company when they’re doing new records and archival releases, he pulls together articles and any research bits he can find that are relevant to that particular record, and he contacted me having seen the footage of the show from the videographer. He asked me would I write a piece about it and then he’d pitch it to Neil Young’s management to see if they’d put it on their official website since he has a section for fans to write stories in. I wrote the story and sent it to this guy, we had to wait for RTÉ and everyone else to clear the documentary for release so at the bottom of what I wrote I mentioned that we had a documentary ready to come out, sent it away and put it out of my mind. That next week I was in work at the time and my phone went so I looked at it, I had an email back from the lad in Germany who’d helped me send it all off and he said Neil Young saw your email and story, and the video too. There was a lovely quote from Neil thanking us for putting it together and complimenting it. It’s great to get that endorsement and accolade from the man himself especially when there’s so many cover bands out there. I’m still pinching myself.
What’s your favourite song from his discography to cover and why?
There’s a song called Down by the River. This is the thing though; Neil has got all these different aspects of his musicality going on. He has acoustic songs, country songs, piano songs, rock songs and so on, so actually I have a few. For a rock song, it’s Down by the River. From an acoustic point of view I’d probably say Out on the Weekend, and for piano, After The Gold Rush.
Cats or dogs?
Oh, that’s really hard to choose. I’m gonna say cats, but only by a whisker!
