Picture This

In Ireland Picture This are Super Stars; their debut single ‘Take My Hand’ is a veritable anthem, the only band ever to sell out 5 successive 3 Arenas (Dublin’s equivalent to London’s O2), and the 4 huge arena shows in Belfast and Dublin in December 2025 sold out in less than one hour with 50k tickets sold. Where did it all begin?

In the small rural Irish town of Athy lived four young men. They each grew up in what is, as estimated by drummer Jimmy Rainsford, a “grey area, a melting pot of craziness and characters” and had interconnected relationships as you tend to do if you’re from a tiny place: they knew each other or vaguely of each other. But it wasn’t until singer Ryan Hennessy uploaded an iPhone video of himself performing an original song onto social media that their shared success story began.

That footage for ‘Take My Hand’ went viral in their home country in 2015 and among those whose hearts and minds it set alight was touring drummer Jimmy, who was back at home with his parents burned out and doubting his chosen career path. There, in front of his screen, he had a premonition that Ryan, then 20-years-old, was his ticket to a whole new legitimised level of musicianship. “Why it was so shocking was that Ryan wasn’t a musician, he wasn’t even a singer – he was a footballer! – but here he was singing and writing songs,” recalls Jimmy, who reached out to him. “I’d always wanted a vehicle to get properly into the music industry as an artist. It was strange that the two of us were from this same town and I was looking for the same thing Ryan was looking for.”

It was true that Ryan was an unlikely contender for frontman of Ireland’s biggest up-and-coming pop band. He grew up on an estate, doing activities relevant for teenage boys like him. Though he wrote poetry in private because his Dad and Grandad had, “you couldn’t walk out into the street and go look at this poem I wrote,” Ryan says. “It was football, clothes and girls and if I saw someone walk down the hall in school with a guitar, I’d be like, really?” When he was 18, he reluctantly chose music as a subject in his final year of school. Since he didn’t play instruments or know music programming, singing was his only option. “When I knew I had to sing at school, I went down to my Dad in the living room and sang an Irish traditional song in front of him to make sure I wasn’t terrible,” remembers Ryan. “He was speechless. The first thing he said was ‘where has this come from? I’ve never even heard you sing around the house.’ After that, everyone told me I had to be a musician and writing poetry turned into music.”

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