Formed in 2007 by Damien Buckley and Tom Doyle, Major Bullhorn are above all else about songwriting.

In 2005 Doyle was working temporarily in Buckley’s place of employment, when he happened across a box of old cassette tapes in Buckley’s office. Doyle was impressed by the fact that he had every album in Buckley’s tape box in his own collection, which was quite a coincidence considering there were 30 odd tapes in the box. After spotting a harmonica on Buckleys desk he left a note on Buckley’s desk asking him would he be interested in meeting up to discuss playing some music together. Buckley got in contact with Doyle and suggested that he could send Doyle a few rough demos of his songs first to see if they had compatible styles. Doyle agreed but by the time Doyle had left, to go to Australia, nothing had arrived so he forgot about it.
On his return in August 2006 Doyle was cleaning out drawers in his mothers house when he found a postpack containing a CD which was addressed to him. It contained a CD with 11 demos of songs written by Buckley which he had eventually got around to posting 3 months after Doyle’s first note. Doyle was so impressed by the songs he endeavoured to contact Buckley the next day. There was no reply from his mobile. On contacting his workplace however Doyle discovered that Buckley had walked out of his office at the end of May and had not been heard of since. Luckily though for Doyle one of Buckley’s work colleagues knew that he sold paintings on Bray promenade on Saturday mornings. That Saturday Doyle travelled to Bray (south of Dublin) and after walking the promenade from the south end he noticed a man selling paintings a few metres ahead. On close inspection of one of the paintings Doyle could see Buckley’s name in the corner. He introduced himself and they struck up a conversation about the demo CD.

The album “ Growth and Repair” …(released in August 2008) contains 3 of Buckleys songs from that original demo CD, 4 more new compositions and 5 songs written by Doyle. Aided by session musician and engineer Stephen Rooney from Dublin, who plays bass, drums, keyboards and sings backing vocals on the album, Major Bullhorn recorded “Growth and Repair” over three weeks in early 2007 at Aer studios ,Wexford. Some of the tracks on the album were recorded live in the studio with no overdubbing.