There has been much media coverage of the newly released album by three Irish priests. Fathers Eugene O’Hagan (48), his brother Martin (45) and their old school friend David Delargy (44) made international headlines after signing a £1m (€1.19m) record deal with Sony BMG earlier this year and their album ‘The Priests’ is already number one in the Irish charts.

Junkies set for fame as LP hits shops

But with the public’s seemingly unending desire to see ‘normal’ people top the charts a new release is threatening to turn this Christmas’s album sales into the kind of battle that not even religion could spark.

‘Give me your money or I’ll cut you, I swear’ is released this Monday by RPA records and features two Dublin drug addicts, Dec O’Reilly and Anto McGavin singing classic songs from years gone by. Dec takes up the story.

“Well we were just blemming around town, like, but as it was the middle of the day an’ all it’s much more harder to smash people’s heads in and rob them, you know? So we were on Henry Street looking to rob some stuff out of Harry Moore’s but we couldn’t find the bleedin’ place. We seen a busker singing and stuff and people were giving him loads of money and that so we told him to fuck off or we’d bite him and we started singing without instruments, you know, acapulco.

Then some bloke from the record coming after coming along and he offered us a deal and we went down to Windmill Lane and sang all the songs we love most. It’s bleedin’ deadly even if I do say so meself an’ all”.

Songs to feature on the album include versions of B*Witched’s ‘Blame it on the weatherman’, ‘China Girl’ by David Bowie, ‘Summer wind’ by Frank Sinatra and Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’.

Dirk Gogan of RPA records told the Irish Sentinel “These lads are the real deal and we’re confident this is going to be a huge success. People love stuff like the X-Factor, the ordinary man or woman coming from heartbreak or rags to riches. This is just the natural progression of that genre”.

So confident are RPA that plans for a follow-up have already been made with former Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder set to produce with Brett Anderson from Suede and Courtney Love drafted in as co-songwriters. “What could possibly go wrong?”, laughed Gogan.

: Listen to the exclusive radio commercial for the album only here on the Irish Sentinel.

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