The Longest Johns take to the seas at O2 Academy Islington, London 2026

Do you know how long it took me to convince the boss that covering The Longest Johns, sea shanty band extraordinaire, on a platform previously called Metal Junkbox is a good idea? Long enough that we rebranded, that’s how long. I’ll save the TED talk on how folk songs are hella metal (seriously, have you ever read the lyrics to ‘Santiana’?) and just go straight into the thick of it, nostalgia and more maritime references than I cared to plan for when I first started writing this notwithstanding.

Seán Dagher

Unsurprisingly surprising, this is quite the emotional experience for me. Seán’s was the first sea shanty voice I ever truly knew by name and loved on its own. His were the first true folk songs that made the rounds of YouTube in those easier times of the 2010s, when suddenly a whole repertoire was opened for those of my generation, raised on Pirates of the Caribbean and left painfully adrift with not a song to sing. The Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag soundtrack was more than just a video game atmosphere contributor, it was an introduction for the millions of us who played it to real historical English and American sea shanties, collected in real anthologies (I found some!) and sung in groups of friends and on stages for longer than Ubisoft has ever been a company.

So to hear his unmistakable distance-piercing voice commanding us, the crew, from his position as the shantyman was a delight through and through. There’s no sitting in silence for him, we all partake. Just like his piratical counterpart, he regales us with stories of his seafaring days (“They told us we were singing too well” leading to progressively more ribald takes of the AC4 shanties) and jests of stagecraft (“The fist in the air is not a suggestion, it actually makes the song sound better” or in order to explain the kind of shout he wants from us, “you’ve come across an unattended keg of whiskey, it’s that kind of oh”). ‘Randy Dandy Oh’ was always a favourite party trick of mine (can you tell how cool I was?) and now I sing mightily along, and when his voice dips into ‘Lowlands Lo’, my heart warms up right by its side.

The Longest Johns

It’s crazy to me I’ve seen these guys 5 times already. They are part of a select circle I’ve baptised “pandemic saviours”, bands and artists I listened to on repeat in the work-from-home cooped-up days of 2020-2022. I wasn’t on TikTok, but I did shed a small tear of joy hearing my pop music friends hum ‘The Wellerman’ in that brief blip of time when sea shanties entered the Zeitgeist. Theirs was one of the first shows I attended after the lockdowns lifted, when everybody was more shy and more eager to connect, all of us awkward and bumping into each other, newborn fawns finding our footing again in the hungry city.

For all their water-based songwriting, The Longest Johns have long ago found their solid ground to stand on. They’ve long been the standard bearers for how to build a loyal community with incredible harmonies, a relentlessly consistent funny and relatable online presence, in-jokes of the mallard variety and pop culture. Made famous on Twitch for their musical pirate adventures in Sea of Thieves and Assassin’s Creed IV, they already had two albums out when “The Wellerman” bounty landed on their shores and made this chapter of their band career possible.

Now promoting their 12th (!) studio album Ends of the Earth, the band comes out to an eager crowd that has long since culled the merely curious and furiously kept the deeply invested. Having recorded much of the standard repertoire, this new offering to their discography is both full of historical deep cuts (‘Hey John Barleycorn’) and their most personally creative yet, with inspiration drawn from mythology (the hype-maker ‘Labyrinth Blues’), urban legend (‘The Mothman’) and of course, more ducks (‘The Mallard’).

We are treated to an jaw-dropping rendition of their classic ‘On the Railroad’ that would have put to shame any metal gig by the sheer earth-shattering tremble of JD’s bass voice (people gasp, I clutch my pearls, their sound guy smiles smugly I hope) and Florin on drums really drives that point home on the final chorus. The more Internet-savvy among us scream for ‘Diggy-Diggy Hole 2’, the more insane i.e. me scream at the mere reference of (very niche yet adored) ‘The White Whale’. There is dancing and clapping to ‘The Llandoger’, swaying to ‘Nantucket’, a group of friends near me holding each other in both revelry and loving companionship.

Singalongs at gigs have people divided. Naturally, I’m of the camp “if you know the words, sing along, join in, partake of the enjoyment, share with your fellow man”. But there’s also the reasonable camp who’d rather pay attention to the band instead of the stag-do behind them, sloshing around the lyrics like tentative roosters in mating season. Luckily, a show such as this solves both our conundrums by making the crowd singing compulsory, almost impulsively so. There is no better song to solve all disputes than ‘Hoist up the Thing’, where again we are the crew and must keep our inept captain from sinking us all. Poor Robbie got punished twice, first being left alone to sing the bawdiest of the ‘Jolly Roving Tar’ lyrics (“never trust a band like us an inch above your knee” SIR THIS IS A RESPECTABLE ESTABLISHMENT) and then with the fish hat for their final song ‘Moby Duck’. It’s a riot and a half.

Nowadays they have fancy light design, plumage and greenery as decor, and several US tours under their belt. The Longest Johns have become a polished well oiled machine (as I’m sure Jack Aubrey would describe the British Navy circa 1810), almost at the risk of creating distance, and yet there is nothing cynical or blasé about it. The heart of it all – the beauty of the songs themselves – is very much still beating and you need only look at their faces as they sing ‘Bones in the Ocean’, “a song we know means a lot to a lot of you” to make sure of it.

Ending with Florin and Antonio (double bass and acrobatics on said bass) joining in the singing, the band go through the beloved ‘Workers Song’ (which created a tremendous community video, featuring jobs from around the world), ‘Santiana’ and naturally ‘The Wellerman’, who Andy urges us to “accept into your hearts and follow me to the sea”. But it’s ‘The Northwest Passage’ with Seán that seals the night for me. Sure, we’ve had all our adventures in far flung soundscapes and plenty of fun in lakes and valleys, but this is where we come back home, truly and achingly so, “this song that made me want to get into this sort of singing in the first place” as JD put it.

The Longest Johns know very well what made people find them and they understand particularly well what makes them stay. The community. The warmth. These age-old songs that tie us back to all who came before us. The joy of singing them.

The ducks.