As St. Patrick’s Day nears, Ocean Beach is getting it’s Irish up with The Fooks, a locally grown band that’s cutting it’s first album and morphing from harder rock into a more traditional blend of folk music.
So says Dale Peters, percussionist with the Irish-inspired rock band begun by Kirk O’Brien seven years ago.
“We perform regularly in San Diego at places like Gallagher’s Irish Pub in Ocean Beach, The Field in the Gaslamp Quarter and The Blarney Stone,” said Peters noting the group even did a two-week tour of Ireland last summer as part of a swing through Europe.
“We toured with an Irish band named the Leadfarmers,” said Peters noting the band, of late, has been going through a transformation in musical styles.
“We started out doing more punk Irish (The Pogues, Flogging Molly), very hard rock,” Peters said. “But over the years Kirk O’Brien, who is older at age 52, has been going more toward folk rock and the blues, so the band has been morphing into much more of a traditional sound, putting our own American spin on Irish ballads.”
Peters said band members of The Fooks weren’t sure how their take on Irish music would go over in the mother country.
“We didn’t know if the Irish would think we were butchering some of the songs from their homeland,” he said adding their reaction was surprising. “They told us, ‘We’ve been hearing these songs, done exactly the same way, for 300 years.’ They were excited about an American band doing them differently, and not trying to do them with a fake Irish accent or doing them in a cheesy way. They liked that we were doing our own version of Irish music.”
The Fooks are in the process of releasing their first album, which is being mixed in the studio right now.
On its Facebookat www.facebook.-com/TheFooks, the band, tongue-in-cheek claims the  “legend” of The Fooks was phrophesied to Kirk O’Brien from the spirit of Bono. O’Brien  heeded the message, setting out on a mission to change the world with his newfound vision of “Power-Celt Rock.” Journeying forth from the Land of Potatoes, Kirk enlisted the aid of singer/guitarist and fellow Bono devotee Doug Pedersen.
As the saga of The Fooks goes, the “pulse” of the The Fooks was supplied by Dale Peters, a highly sophisticated drumming “robot” whose name is an acronym for Digital Audio Life-form Emulation Percussion Technology Rock System; D.A.L.E. Pe.Te.R.S. for short).
“Seeking a place among the most epic, he (Gilly) joined forces with The Fooks, and the rest is history,” concludes the saga of the band on its Facebook site.
The Fooks perform the first Friday or Saturday of the month at Gallagher’s in OB, and every other Friday at The Filed in the Gaslamp. They will be one of several groups performing at Shamrock, the annual St. Patrick’s Day block party in the Gaslamp District, to be held this year on Saturday, March 15.