What to know
- Ed Sheeran encouraged fans at his Rogers Centre concerts to see his tourmates Beoga perform at Toronto’s much smaller Rivoli, and the show quickly sold out.
- The Irish folk group co-wrote and performed on Sheeran’s “Galway Girl” and “Nancy Mulligan” and is currently touring with the pop superstar.
- Beoga’s first solo Toronto show mixed traditional Irish music, humour and crowd participation with songs spanning the group’s nearly 25-year career.
- The band acknowledged Sheeran’s endorsement brought many fans through the door, but used the intimate show to introduce Toronto to its own music and personality.
- Beoga promised the crowd it wouldn’t wait as long before returning to Toronto for another headline show.
When Ed Sheeran told 50,000 people at his Rogers Centre show Thursday night to go see Beoga play at the Rivoli on Sunday (Aug. 23), it was amusing because the historic Queen Street West venue holds only about 240 people. The show sold out instantly.
The long-running Irish folk group, which co-wrote and performed with Sheeran on “Galway Girl” and “Nancy Mulligan” from his 2017 album ÷ (Divide), is currently touring with the pop superstar, joining him mid-set for seven songs.
Beoga — whose name means lively — certainly lived up to it at the Riv, although the crowd was arguably livelier, clapping, cheering and whistling to the band’s spirited accordion, fiddle and bodhrán driven music. Their new album, Phases, was released in June.
When Beoga first took the stage, bodhrán player Eamon Murray asked how many Irish, Scottish and English people were in the house — and there were plenty — before launching into “The Homestead Hero.”
After the song, Murray addressed the obvious question. “Was anybody out there at Ed Sheeran’s shows over the weekend?” he asked, prompting a roar. Sheeran played three sold-out stadium shows in Toronto.
“Excuse me, great pleasure, welcome,” he said, teasing the crowd that Sheeran was coming out. “No, no, no. He’s too sick today. He’s as sick as a small hospital.”
He then introduced “Subject to Change” and reflected on the group’s unlikely situation. “We’re in this bizarre position of being on this world tour with a big, huge pop star and we’re in a folk band from Ireland, you know what I mean? We’ve been together for 25 years. And sometimes we wonder, like, ‘Jesus Christ, how have we ended up here?’”
Then came the punchline: backstage, he said, they had looked at themselves in the mirror and realized it was “actually raw, unadulterated sex appeal.”
“Thank you for awkwardly agreeing,” he joked.
For anyone who knew Beoga only through its association with Sheeran, the night was a chance to discover there is considerably more to the band than “Galway Girl” — the massive hit with 1.63 billion Spotify streams.
The current lineup — Murray, Niamh Dunne on fiddle and vocals, Seán Óg Graham on guitar and accordion, Damian McKee on accordion and Liam Bradley on piano — has spent almost 25 years and seven studio albums building a reputation for taking traditional Irish music and pushing it in fresh directions.
The band also brought stories and tributes to the set. “Shore Road Punk” was dedicated to their late friend Paddy “The Punk” Devlin, with his voice immortalized at the end of the recording. “Little Lady Low” is about the Celtic goddess Clíodhna, “with the power to heal,” who fell in love with a mortal man. Her punishment was to be struck down and washed away, said Dunne.
The song, she explained, was ultimately “for all the feminists, for the women and the men.”
There was also interaction with the crowd, bringing a volunteer onstage to play cowbell. The band also had boisterous friends and relatives in the audience. Dunne, it turns out, spent a summer in Toronto when she was 19, while Bradley has cousins here. But this was Beoga’s first solo performance in Toronto.
The set moved through songs including “Monos,” Sandy Denny’s “Old Fashioned Waltz,” and “Anne Bonny” with the musicians barely needing encouragement to turn the tiny room into a party.
Murray also acknowledged the obvious reason many people were there in the first place: Sheeran’s endorsement.
“I know it helps that we’re on the biggest tour in the world at the minute, with the biggest pop star in the world,” he said, thanking the crowd for coming “on the strength of that.”
But the joke, of course, was that they might have been expecting Sheeran.
“I hope everybody does expect to see Ed Sheeran, you know, as disappointed, because… Actually, come on, bring him on,” he joked again. “We’ll see you very soon.”
For the encore, Beoga didn’t leave the stage; Murray joked that it’s “needy.” They ended with “Dolan’s 6AM.”
“We have to go somewhere next September. We’ll off to Detroit or somewhere,” he said to boos. “Toronto, yeah! It’s really a pleasure, really a pleasure. Thank you for coming out, guys. We will not leave it as long again for our next Toronto show.”
