THE IRISH NEWS:

Posted by Jim on November 23, 2025

‘We had great times up there over the years’ – The Fureys prepare to bid a last farewell with Belfast and Derry gigs.

The revered folk band are retiring after 50 years on the road, writes Robert McMillen.

The Fureys and Davie Arthur were always a feature of musical life from the 60s onwards

By Robert McMillen

November 21, 2025 at 8:53am GMT

Speaking to George Furey of the famed Furey Brothers was a beginning and an end. A beginning in that George was doing an interview using Zoom for the first time, and an end as we were chatting about the last ever gigs the band will be playing in Belfast and in Derry.

They are both places the Fureys (and Davey Arthur) have fond memories of in 49 years of delighting audiences at home and around the world.

There is nothing nicer than a band singing a song, stopping, and letting the audience sing the rest, and the Fureys are masters of that

— Robert McMillen

“We had great times up there over the years,” says George.

“In the early years when we played in the Ulster Hall, which always had a great atmosphere in it – although we once had a fella who was used to performing in pubs in Dublin who was petrified at having audience members sitting on stage behind him!

“He was surrounded and didn’t know what to do,” says George.

There was, of course, no need, as a Fureys gig has all the feeling of a family get-together, band and audience.

There is nothing nicer than a band singing a song, stopping, and letting the audience sing the rest, and the Fureys are masters of that. So it’s no wonder 2026 will see George and the band celebrating their 50th year playing together. But of course, the story goes back to the parents, Ted and Nora. “Ah, they were great people,” George reminisces.

“They were great talkers. So many of the songs that were written for us over the years, particularly the one Phil Coulter wrote for us, The Old Man, are stories about our father and mother when we were growing up.

“I remember many years ago, we were away—1973—I went to Copenhagen with my father and he was playing in this fiddlers’ festival. There were all these fiddle players from Scandinavia and of course my father was invited over, and he asked would I come for company, and I stayed with him for most of my life playing music.”

While Ted Furey was pivotal in his sons’ musical direction, George says he can’t leave his mother out.

“Our mother was born in Tipperary town and she was always humming songs when she was doing the housework in the morning time, and that’s where we got the idea for Sweet Sixteen, because she used to hum it around the house.

“And we were asking her one time, we said, where did you get that song from? And she told this whole story about the man who wrote it, Jimmy Thornton – who also came from Tipperary and who emigrated off to Chicago, where he became a comedian and married his girlfriend Bonnie Thornton.

“And so my mother told us a whole lot. And I remember going into the studios one Sunday afternoon and recording Sweet Sixteen. It only took one take, which goes to show – you always listen to your mammy,” he laughs.

When they were young, there was little time for doing much else but play music, and as kids, they did a lot of busking.

“Our father used to have us at the football matches,” George recalls.

“We used to go to all the football matches and we’d busk. Not only on the train, there and back, but we’d go into the football ground and play.

“I remember in Croke Park, you could walk right around where there was a little place. We used to go over the wall, so we’d have the accordion going over the wall and then me over and my brother Paul, and we’d busk inside!”

When the Furey boys became of age, they went their own ways and, oddly enough, it was a car accident that brought them together.

“Yeah, myself and my brother Paul and Davey Arthur, we had the band called The Buskers. And we used to play an awful lot on the continent all the time. But I remember we were coming down from Hanover, and we were travelling down to Frankfurt, and as we were going along, we stopped at a set of traffic lights when a guy smacked into the back of us.

“Luckily enough, nothing really happened to us, but the news went around that we were all very hurt.

“The one who crashed into the back of us was heading off to see his wife in hospital, where she had just delivered her first child.”

So not only was a child born, but The Fureys and Davey Arthur were also born.

“We always said, if anything is going to happen to us, let us be all together there. At least we can look after each other,” says George.

While the Fureys are best known for their ballads and singalong favorites – I Will Love You, When You Were Sweet 16, Red Rose Café, Leaving Nancy, The Old Man, From Clare to Here – their influence goes way beyond that.

Did you know that legendary indie Radio 1 DJ John Peel made Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway – the song written for Eddie Furey by Gerry Rafferty of Baker Street fame – his single of the year in 1973?

Or that Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics has credited Eddie with teaching him his first chords on the guitar while still a teenager?

The band’s musical longevity is down to the fact that you’ll know a Fureys song from the moment you hear the first chord.

“Other bands, like The Dubliners, you knew it was them, and the Clancy Brothers especially were brilliant at what they did, and that’s the way we were – we wanted to do our own thing all the time, and people would identify us by that.

“But not only that, we always put our heart and soul into songs. They mean an awful lot to us and they come from the heart,” says George.

Inevitably, changes have occurred over the years. Their brother Paul died suddenly in June 2002, Finbar left the band in December 1996, and Davey took a stroke in March 2014. However, George and older brother Eddie have continued to delight audiences on their tours and releasing CDs.

But all good things come to an end, although George doesn’t recognise the word “retirement.”

“For me, retirement is giving it up. We were born into the music and I’ll probably end up with the music, that kind of way.”

The Fureys will say farewell to Belfast with their last ever concert in the city at the Waterfront Hall on Friday, January 2, while their final gig in the north will be at the Millennium Forum on Thursday, May 21, 2026.