They’re still the same five lads who lit up Galway – and then the country – back in the late eighties. Even now when the Stunning come back to town, as Steve Wall himself admits, it looks like a reunion of the Class of 1990 on a night out.

They wrote the anthems of our younger days – Brewing Up a Storm, Everything That Rises, Half Past Two, Romeo’s on Fire – and they’ve just produced a new album that breathes new life into ten of their classics, all in collaboration with guest singers and musicians that take familiar songs into wonderful new places.

We Come Alive started out as a television documentary, bringing in these guest stars with little advance notice of what they’d be singing or playing on – and just seeing where it would take them.

“We didn’t really want to let the other musicians know what they would be playing, because we didn’t want them to feel that they had to learn them off. We wanted them to arrive and bring their own gut reaction,” explains Steve.

The result was a mesmerising documentary that has now been released as an album, with nine tracks from the show – and a tenth one thrown in for good measure.

The album, also called We Come Alive, was released as a digital download on Bandcamp a week ago and for fans of the band – even those who missed the documentary – it’s a chance to wallow in those anthems in a whole new way.

The guest artists include Mundy, Camile O’Sullivan, Faye O’Rourke from Little Green Cars and Soda Blonde, Shobsy, Niwel Tsumbu – the Congolese artist who has living here for nearly 20 years – Máirtín O’Connor, Zoë Conway and others.

“Some we knew, some we didn’t, but we admired them,” explains Steve.

Caption: The Stunning (from left) Derek Murray, Joe Wall, Steve Wall, Jimmy Higgins and Cormac Dunne.

Get the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.