Punk ‘tude with an Irish heart

The phrase “alternative punk” might sound like an oxymoron -- unless you’re talking about Flogging Molly.

The long-running L.A. band barnstorms through its shows, but not with your standard-issue punk artillery: electric guitars factory equipped with just two chords, a bass cranked to 11 and drums that use a machine-gun volley as a metronome.

Rather, the outfit comes to a stage with accordion, mandolin, tin whistles, banjo, acoustic guitars -- instrumentation that seems more befitting an Irish folk band.

That’s because Flogging Molly’s head folk is Dave King, a Dublin native who grew up steeped in traditional Irish music but also with a strong affinity for musical mavericks who transcend genre limitations.

“To me, Johnny Cash is punk,” King, 43, said during a recent interview at a Mexican restaurant in Venice where he was quietly suffering with a cold just before the group headed out on a tour that brings it back home for St. Patrick’s week performances Friday and Saturday at the House of Blues Anaheim. “To me, the Dubliners are punk, even though they use traditional instrumentation.”

In fact, King said the first two albums he owned were by those two acts: Cash’s landmark “At Folsom Prison” album from 1968 and the Dubliners’ “Finnegan Wakes,” a live album recorded in 1966 at Dublin’s Gate Theater.

In retrospect, decades after first hearing those recordings, King realizes that they played a crucial role in Flogging Molly’s supercharged concert performances.

“We are a live band,” King says in a brogue that’s only slightly softened by the 15 years he’s lived in L.A. since emigrating from Ireland.

Where some musicians aspire to a larger-than-life model of rock stardom of the likes of the Who or Led Zeppelin, King and his six bandmates pride themselves on remaining on a par with their fans.

“I think people see the band as an extension of themselves. There’s no pretension,” he says. “For me, I feel real lucky to be up there. I’m serious about the songs, but at the same time it’s on stage where the celebration aspect comes in.”

Flogging Molly’s recordings also combine the energy and attitude of punk with the narrative and unabashed emotionalism of Irish folk music, elements that are in equal abundance on the group’s latest album, “Within a Mile of Home.”

For a group that’s been gigging regularly around its L.A. home base for years -- its name grew out of its long residency at Molly Malone’s pub on Fairfax Avenue -- it has developed a solid national following that still appears to be growing. The group’s previous album, 2002’s “Drunken Lullabies,” has sold more than 300,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan, and “Within a Mile of Home” has topped 200,000 since it came out in September.

King knows his group is mining a vein that’s been tapped by others, including Ireland’s Horslips in the ‘70s, the Pogues in the ‘80s and Boston’s Dropkick Murphys in the ‘90s, but feels confident that Molly is contributing its own spin rather than simply hopping aboard a bandwagon.

“With each album we feel like we have to push our own abilities a little,” he says. That includes testing themselves in front of different audiences -- for instance, when the band hooked on to the alt-rock-heavy Warped Tour several years ago.

“We got out there with our accordion and banjo and tin whistles and I thought, ‘Good God, what have we gotten ourselves into?’ I think people looked at us in the beginning as kind of a novelty band, but once we started playing, they were great,” King says.

“If you’re afraid of what people think about what you do, you shouldn’t be doing it. I got the biggest compliment when Spider [Stacy] from the Pogues told me, ‘What we took from the Dubliners and made our own, you’ve taken from us and are making it your own.’ We’re not trying to rip off anybody.”

For Flogging Molly’s latest album, King delved into the personal turmoil of the breakup of his marriage, and even though that meant songs that tend to be more reflective of his life than the band’s previous efforts, he said he never got the urge to turn it into a solo album.

“Emotionally, I was pretty much a wreck,” he says. “Thank God I had the opportunity to write about it. I’m very lucky to be able to sit down, pick up a guitar and be honest with myself. I can write the most personal lyrics and still bring those songs to the band. I’ve been in other groups where you’d write some things and you couldn’t imagine sharing them, but with this band, we’re all such good friends, there’s nothing that seems too personal.”

“Factory Girls,” for which Lucinda Williams contributes a guest vocal, is a grittily imagined tale of what his mother’s life was like as a young working woman in Dublin. The title track is King’s attempt to capture the feeling of never quite being truly happy -- a trait he says he wrestles with regularly.

The one area in which it seems King has come closer than any other is his band, which also includes multi-instrumentalist Bridget Regan, guitarist Dennis Casey, accordionist Matt Hensley, bassist Nathen Maxwell, mandolinist-banjo player Robert Schmidt and drummer George Schwindt.

Its birth represented something of a homecoming for a kid who started out playing in hard rock bands because he rebelled as a teen against the American country music loved by his father, who died of cancer when King was 10. He also initially shied from the punk rock that exploded in the late ‘70s because it seemed to him that “it was mostly rich kids who were into it.”

He moved to the U.S. in 1990, settling in L.A., and joined a succession of bands. But one day he heard future bandmate Bridget Regan playing Irish music on fiddle and something clicked.

“I realized that I had come to America to figure out how to get back to Ireland,” he says. “I don’t think I ever would have done this kind of music if I’d stayed in Ireland. But I heard her play fiddle and it kicked me into gear. I realized I’d been struggling all this time, and what I really wanted to do was go back home.”

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Randy Lewis can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Flogging Molly

Where: House of Blues Anaheim, 1530 S. Disneyland Drive, Anaheim

When: 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Price: $20-$22

Info: (714) 778-2583