The album is a mix of some of the band's favourite covers along with five new original songs and was a project born out of COVID-19 lockdowns preventing the band from performing live for most of 2020.

It is a culmination of 12 months of enforced isolation with both creativity in the writing of some new songs as well as the development and evolution of some of the older and popular ones.

The seven-piece band is a tight-knit affair, led by lead singer John Murphy who is joined by his sons Pat and Lachlan Murphy, brother David Murphy, cousin Paul Britt, Stephen Russell and Brendan Spratling. The original songs were written by Lachlan and Stephen, with the production completed in-house by Pat.

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John Murphy said his Dunnstown home was turned into a studio to record the album through lockdown.

"When COVID came along, we didn't have anything to do and so it was always in the back of our heads that we'd love to do an album and that gave us the opportunity," he said.

"My son Lachlan is a gun songwriter, he's been in some very good bands over the years and Stephen Russell is also a very good songwriter and so we've been able to put about five songs together and that's our album.

"We class ourselves as a live band and we wanted the album to have that live band experience. Believe it or not, there's about five songs on it that were actually one take."

Mr Murphy said while many think of Old Melbourne Road as an Irish band, their influences spread much further than traditional Irish music with songs about Irish unification or early 20th century Ballarat folk songs featuring a heavy rock beat.

"The band is really evolving. We've even started on our next album and we think our next album, the majority will be original songs so that's really exciting," he said.

"We're classed as an Irish band and that sort of bugs me a little bit because we're a lot more than that. We're sort of like a folk rock band and we actually enjoy playing Australian songs even more than the Irish songs.

"Pat plays the electric guitar and he's right out there with his music and he has this really sort of psychedelic flair to a lot of the tunes."

Old Melbourne Road are launching the album at The Cabaret Club in Warrenheip on Saturday, April 17 with proper available through the band's Facebook page or on streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp. Tickets for the album launch party are $10 each and available at ballarattickets.com.au

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