Offaly singer's "Mass bangers" go viral Down Under!

When Offaly singer/songwriter Paul Luby was sitting in the pew of a Sydney church one Sunday and heard a well-known hymn from his childhood, Here I Am, Lord, he came up with the idea of “speeding it up” and playing it at a gig in his local pub.

The inspired idea to test out the popular upbeat hymn at his last gig in Sydney before making the move to Perth in Western Australia resulted in the talented 27-year-old Rahan musician becoming a viral sensation, with a video from the night amassing 2.6 million views on Instagram and almost a million views on Tiktok to date.

Such was the popularity of that first hymn being tested out on a whole new audience that Paul Luby decided to release it as a single on Spotify earlier this month and he has also released a string of over 20 well-known church hymns on his hugely-popular Instagram account which have been racking up thousands of views and positive comments.

Having toyed with the idea of calling the hymns 'bangers and Mass' he eventually settled on the title of 'Mass bangers' and his novel take on liturgical music has attracted interest from numerous radio stations and other media outlets across the globe, including RTE and also EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) which is the world's largest religious media network and broadcasts 24/7.

“The gas thing about EWTN is that I used to watch Mass on it with my mother when I was a young lad and then I just rang her up one day and told her I was going to be on it,” said Paul, during an interview with the Offaly Independent.

The only son of Pius and Ita Luby from Rahan, and the youngest in a family of five, Paul relocated to Australia in 2022 along with a few friends with the intention of “staying for a year” he says.

Having played gigs in his local pub in Rahan, The Thatch, and also been a member of a local band called 'District' he was already an accomplished performer prior to moving to Australia, but he admits that he found the prospect of gigging in a completely new environment “a bit daunting” and that he “probably lacked a bit of confidence”.

Fate intervened however, when he was asked to “step in and do a gig” at a popular pub in the Coogee Beach area of Sydney after the resident entertainer got Covid. “The owner came up to me after and said he'd get me back again, and that was the start of it.”

After gigging on his own for a while, Paul teamed up with acclaimed banjo player, and fellow Offaly musician, Jack Cunningham from Daingean, with the duo calling themselves 'High Tides' and securing gigs in pubs and entertainment venues across Sydney and also numerous private and corporate gigs.

“When I told Jack that I was thinking of singing Hear I Am, Lord at my last gig at Frank Macs in Sydney, where we had a residency, he said he didn't know it, and then he said maybe it wasn't the place to be singing a hymn, but he knows I'm stubborn so I was going to sing it anyway, and we honestly couldn't believe the reaction,” recalls the affable Rahan man.

“Everyone in the pub knew the words and they were all singing along, it was just unreal.”

Having grown up in a religious family, Paul Luby is very keen to point out that his idea of speeding up popular Church hymns and introducing them to a new audience in a social setting is not intended in any way to be blasphemous.

“I go to Mass myself, and to be honest I love a choir, I used to sing in the Church choir in Rahan so I would know a lot of the hymns and the idea of speeding them up and playing them at my gigs just came to me that day in Mass and I said to myself 'why not give it a go?'”

Paul feels he has tapped into “a certain nostalgia” among his audience of Irish ex-pats by incorporating church hymns into his music sets. “Even though a lot of people would have drifted from attending Mass regularly, everyone knows the words of the hymns and they sing along to every word and, at the end of the day, music is music."

Paul says his family are all delighted to see him blending the sacred with the secular at his gigs, and his friends are just taking it in their stride and are hugely supportive of him, as is his Australian girlfriend.

While still working at his day job in construction, the talented Rahan musician is also an accomplished songwriter who has already recorded and released a number of his own compositions.

He hopes to someday be able to make a living as a full-time musician, but is keenly aware of how difficult it is achieve that dream.

He has written a song called Australia which he hopes to release later this year. “I always wanted to write a song about what it's like to move your whole life to the other side of the world, and the difficulties in finding your feet and fitting in, and how things eventually slot into place, so it's a song that speaks very much to the emigrant experience,” he says.

Describing himself as “an optimist by nature” Paul says he has played to both big and small audiences at this stage, but he feels that if he can “make happiness for one moment for just one person” he has fulfilled his job as a musician.

“Music radiates positivity so I am lucky to be able to bring a bit of positivity to other people, and that in turn keeps me positive” he says.

He will return to Sydney this June for his first-ever headline show in the suburb of Surrey Hills where he will be incorporating a number of his own compositions alongside his ever-expanding repetoire of 'Mass bangers' – although he is hoping he won't have “run out of hymns by then!”