The Longest Residency on Second Avenue, The Prodigals Make History
The Prodigals have held the same Kips Bay stage since 1997, and Guinness finally took notice
Most New York bands measure a run in weeks. The Prodigals measure theirs in decades. The Celtic punk outfit first played Paddy Reilly's Music Bar on St. Patrick's Day in 1997, and they never really left. Now Guinness World Records has made official what regulars at 519 Second Avenue have known for a long time. No band on the books has kept an annual residency going longer.
The official title is the longest annual residency by a band. The count stands at twenty-nine consecutive years and, by IrishCentral's reckoning, more than fifteen hundred shows in the same room. The previous holder, according to the Cavan newspaper the Anglo Celt, was a band called Southern Comfort, which logged twenty-two years at a harbourside bar in Devon, England. The band only realized it had passed that mark when a friend pointed it out to its singer.
A Bar Built on One Pour
Paddy Reilly's sits at Second Avenue and 29th Street in Kips Bay. It opened in June 1986, a partnership between Steve Duggan and the Irish ballad singer Paddy Reilly, and for a time it was known as a bar that poured nothing but Guinness. For forty years it has been a gathering place for Irish New York, the kind of room where a traditional session and a punk set feel like the same tradition.
The bar has had its own interruptions. In 2023 it shut for about two months of renovations and reopened on June 8 under new owners, Desi Murray, who had been managing the place, and Josh Irwin, a longtime customer. The music came back with the pints, and the Prodigals stayed on the calendar.
The story of how the band got the gig has become house lore. Gregory Grene, the singer and accordion player and the only founding member still in the lineup, told the Anglo Celt that he approached Duggan about a booking. Duggan, he recalled, turned to a woman beside him and asked, "So what do you think, Joanie? Should we give them the job?" The woman was Joanie Madden, the celebrated flute and whistle player who leads Cherish the Ladies. Her answer was yes, and it has stayed yes ever since.
Most New York bands measure a run in weeks. The Prodigals measure theirs in decades.
Twenty-Nine Years of Weekends
The residency has outlasted a lot. It has outlasted lineups. The current band pairs Grene with guitarist and singer Michael Lewis, drummer Eamon Ellams, who has played with Riverdance and on Broadway, and Sean Tierney on tin whistle and flute. For years the standing date was Friday. Since the pandemic, the Anglo Celt reports, the band has added Saturdays, and the Post says they now play both nights when they are not on tour.
The Village Voice once called the group New York's jig-punk answer to the Pogues. The band has also had its bigger moments. The Prodigals have released ten albums, played Madison Square Garden and Lincoln Center, and landed music in the 2008 film Pride and Glory. Through all of it, the weekly show at Paddy Reilly's stayed on the books.
Getting the record certified was its own kind of archival project. Grene dug through old gig diaries, receipts, and booking notes to build the case, then submitted the evidence earlier this year. Confirmation came in August. It is a fitting detail. A band that plays the same room every week ends up with the paperwork to prove it.
There is something very New York about the whole thing. Music rooms close, rents climb, and the places people swear they will love forever turn into something else. A pub band holding one stage for nearly three decades runs against every current in the local economy. It is not a revival or a reunion. It is simply a group of musicians who kept showing up.
The Night the Record Came Home
The band marked the occasion on Friday, September 18, with a Half-Way to St. Patrick's Day party at the bar. IrishCentral's preview promised opening sets from former members and a 10 p.m. start for the main band. The New York Post was there and reported a roaring crowd that got louder still when old members picked up their instruments. Past and present Prodigals shared one night, which is about as close to a family photo as a pub band gets.
Grene sounded moved by the moment. "I am absolutely delighted," he told the New York Post, adding that the record gave him the odd sense of time both moving forward and standing still. He also spoke about the city itself, telling the Post that New York has a warmth that rarely gets the credit it deserves.
"It's just simply extraordinary," Grene told the New York Post.
The crowd tells its own story. According to the Post, most of the people who now fill the room on Fridays and Saturdays were not yet born when the band first played there. Grene told the paper the young audience feels "strangely analogous" to the ones from the early years. The faces changed. The energy in front of the stage did not.
That is the quiet argument a residency makes. A tour is a series of first impressions. A residency is a long conversation with one neighborhood. Some of the people dancing at the front were not alive for the first set, and they came anyway.
For anyone who wants to see a world record in person, the lesson is simple. Walk to Second Avenue and 29th Street on a Friday or Saturday night, order a pint of Guinness, and wait for the accordion. For a different kind of loyalty to one room, read our piece on the hotel bar that never changed. The Prodigals will be there, as they have been for twenty-nine years, already counting toward thirty.
