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Review & setlist: Dropkick Murphys come on strong, avert disaster at soggy Suffolk Downs
The diehards who hung out through the rain delay were rewarded with an intense turn by Ken Casey and the boys.
Dropkick Murphys, with The Hold Steady, at Seisiún, The Stage at Suffolk Downs, Boston, Sept. 6, 2025.
Seisiún:
That day one of the inaugural Seisiún festival of Irish music ended at all was no small triumph. With a thunderstorm warning turning into a heavy downpour late on Saturday afternoon, the Suffolk Downs grounds were cleared not long before Irish punk legends Stiff Little Fingers were due to take the stage, and it was a very long time before it was even known whether the music would resume at all.
The all-clear was finally given about two hours later via a network of social-media posts so infrequent and inconsistent across platforms that many attendees resorted to posting updates from Instagram in the comments of the still-unchanged official Facebook notice. (No announcement was actually made in the OTB parlor or parking lot where folks were riding the storm out.) As if that weren’t bad enough, the rain turned the grounds into a sodden marsh and planes on their final descent into Logan drowned out the music and filled the air with the stench of jet fuel.
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But say what you want about an evacuation-necessitating weather event: It does a great job of honing a crowd. So many attendees simply went home after waiting in vain for word from the venue that the folks remaining were the ones dedicated enough to endure hardship to see the remaining two bands. (Stiff Little Fingers were bounced from the Saturday lineup; no word on whether they were being rescheduled for Sunday as of press time, but festivalgoers were told that their Saturday tickets would be honored on Sunday as well.)
Pity those who came for the Hold Steady, whose charged and wiry gloss on early Springsteen began while hundreds of concertgoers were still moving through the cattle lines of reentry.
So the audience was somewhat battle-scarred (or battle-soaked, anyway) when the Dropkick Murphys took the stage armed with a 15-minute stay on the noise curfew and a burst of energy that came from the tension of an afternoon and evening’s worth of uncertainty and frustration finally being released. The blasting charge of “The Boys Are Back” announced their arrival, and they played to the reduced turnout as if it were an overflowing festival crowd.
A lot of that has to do with the Murphys holding community sacrosanct above just about all else; no matter how many or how few show up, they show up. And that came through in the band’s approach of treating the audience as another member of the group, so much so that it was easy to get the impression that their songs aren’t completed until the fans do their part. Singer Ken Casey constantly held his microphone out and down to the audience, even catching someone crowdsurfing past him just long enough for the guy to bellow out a few words of “Boys On The Docks” before he was gone again.
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It was also baked into their songs. At first glance, “Who’ll Stand With Us?,” “Bury The Bones” and others take a defiant stance against fascism, with the latter song illustrated with footage of ICE kidnappings, Klan parades and American Nazi marches as well as resistance to all of them. But right alongside that subject matter was an understanding that the way to win those battles is together, and as combative as the Murphys can present themselves, there was also a genial, welcoming nature serving as the band’s heartbeat.
So long as you don’t stand in their way, that is. There’s still that defiance, after all, and the Murphys attacked their material with ferocity. “Skinhead On The MBTA” and “Middle Finger” were hardcore punk in their breathless velocity, albeit with Matt Kelly’s drums offering an additional skip that underlined the Irish traditional music that makes so many of their songs simply hypercharged reels. Even the mandolin- and accordion-driven minor-key folk of “Rose Tattoo” was enough to generate a huge mosh pit near the stage, despite Kevin Rheault’s bass being the only electric instrument being played at the time.
But the Murphys could also be heartfelt, as in the wartime-dead folk song “The Green Fields Of France (No Man’s Land)” — a live debut for the band, as evidenced by Casey forgetting some of the words and then spitting them out quickly and apologetically to catch up — and a pair of songs (“Good Rats” and “One Last Goodbye ‘Tribute To Shane'”) sung in tribute to the late Shane McGowan of Sunday Seisiún headliners the Pogues.
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By that time, it was already past curfew and the rain had started up again, so the band cranked up “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” and sent folks into the night. If anyone didn’t get what they’d come for, it wouldn’t be the fault of the Murphys.
Setlist for Dropkick Murphys at The Stage at Suffolk Downs, Sept. 6, 2025
- The Boys Are Back
- Skinhead On The MBTA
- Who’ll Stand With Us?
- Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ya
- Blood
- Longshot (with The Scratch)
- Boys On The Docks
- Chesterfields And Aftershave
- School Days Are Over (Ewan Maccoll cover)
- The Green Fields Of France (No Man’s Land) (Eric Bogle cover)
- Bury The Bones
- Middle Finger
- Tessie
- Out Of Our Heads
- Good Rats
- American Land (Bruce Springsteen cover)
- Rose Tattoo
- One Last Goodbye “Tribute To Shane” (with The Scratch)
- I’m Shipping Up To Boston
Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.
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