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I hate the Irish! After university I went travelling with a couple of my mates round Australia in a campervan. We’d rock up at some idyllic location by the coast, get out our guitars and start a camp fire. You can imagine the scene - the open sky stretching out for miles in every direction and huddled around the warmth would be an international selection of ultra trendy twenty something’s singing along to songs like my speciality, Train Friends. …And then, from nowhere a little Irish voice would chirp up, “I can sing a few songs,” and that would be that. Every time! Like they lived under rocks and had a pathological desire to prevent me wooing women. Without fail, wherever we hid, Irish people would step up and steal my thunder. On guitar they would sparkle, on pipes they would mesmerise, on drums fashioned from kangaroo hide they would enchant. Often it would break into wondrous ten–part vocal harmonies as their fellow countrymen crept out of the darkness until we had the living embodiment of the flipping Cranberries leading the misguided youth into a mist of a euphoric music like the personification of the pied-piper of Hamlin had walked into camp. Gemma Hayes is the worst of all of them. She can sing like an angel, she is phenomenally attractive and she has the most delightfully bubbly personality I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. Listening to her transports me straight back to those camp fire nights and as Monty Python’s Gumby Man would say; “It makes me MAAAAD!” | 
