It occurs to me tonight, literally between the jigs and reels, that there’s a madness in the Irish, a wildness that inhabits our souls. We’re an island race, clinging to a rugged rock on the furthest Western shores of Europe. One coast facing an ancient friend and foe and the other shore looking out onto the […]
Local heroes and self-styled folk miscreants, Lynched are back in their dirty auld town tonight to finish off a year which has seen their star continuing to ascend, with a sold out performance in Vicar Street. And as we face in to the soggy fag-end of music’s annus most horribilis, its makes for a pleasant change […]
Armed with just his fiddle, a looper and his very contagious Whest of Ireland wit, Aindrias de Staic returns to Dublin next month with his “Man from Moogaga” show in Whelan’s on Sunday 4th December. State caught him last year in the capital, read our review here. Giving double bang for the buck this time out […]
Even with the hyperbolic machine in overdrive it would be impossible to overstate the importance of Planxty to Irish traditional music. They spearheaded a renaissance in the ’70s that reignited the public’s interest in traditional music that resonates to this day. The four piece consisting of Andy Irvine, Liam O’Flynn, Donal Lunny (far right) and […]
Never the most willing participant in the perceived interfering tedium and banality of the rock and roll media circus at the best of times, Nick Cave baulked at the thought of having to suffer the indignities of the endless parade of intrusive interviews required to promote his latest release, Skeleton Tree. Instead he commissioned fellow […]
Boom! Less than 10 minutes after taking to the stage tonight, Earth Wind and Fire hit us with both barrels and drop a full tilt ‘Boogie Wonderland’ on us in all its extended boogilicious glory. If this is in their opening salvo then what other delights await us? The 12-piece strong band flex their musical muscle […]
And he was funky. Fittingly enough I first heard about Prince through a King. Unfortunately that King was the garish Jonathan King on the equally garish BBC 2 program Entertainment USA. For those of ye lucky enough not to remember said program it was an 80s magazine style program that featured what was “hot ‘n’ […]
So “What Went Down”? Foals, that’s what. Four albums into their ever-upwardly trajectory and with their biggest headlining show in Ireland to date, Oxford’s finest (well apart rom Radiohead, Ride et all), Foals, blow into town tonight riding on the coat tails of Imogen’s bluster and get set to storm the 3arena. Not a bad […]
Growing up in ’80s Ireland was shite. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying, wasn’t there or is suffering from rose-tinted, selective amnesia. Mass emigration, the brain-drain, never ending dole queues for those left behind. The gubu political shenanigans of Charlie Haughey and his ilk. Home owners were crippled with double digit interest rates; […]
It’s Sunday, it’s wet’n’windy and by the time I drag my tardy ass into the 3Arena The Stranglers are already in full flow commanding me ‘To Get a Grip on Yourself’. Three classics follow, the smacked-out bliss of their louche paean to opiates ‘Golden Brown’ gives way to the perfect guitar pop of ‘Always the Sun’ […]
It’s a hard sell, a musical retelling of an event that happened 102 years ago. The centenary missed, what ever hoopla and interest that was drummed up over the Lockout in 2013 has long since dissipated, surely 1916 is now the prize. There are obvious connections between the struggles of the early union movement and […]
It’s a cold hoor of a night in the Capital as I navigate past the post-hurricane Barney flotsam and debris blowing around Smithfield; brushing past the late evening commuters, the early Friday night revellers, the homeless and the hopeless as I make for the warm maternal embrace of the Cobblestone to catch Aindrias de Staic’s […]
According to Homer J. Simpson, rock attained perfection in 1974 with the bong rattling bass of Grand Funk Railroad and their ilk. Now far be it for me to contradict that yellowest and wisest of sages but by my reckoning that zenith was reached four years earlier, in 1970 with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s […]
Do you remember your first time? That moment when your innocence was lost? When you stepped across that line, that Rubicon that couldn’t be uncrossed? A formative, life changing rite of passage that meant you would never be quite the same again. My moment of de-flowering found me leaning against a canteen wall out in UCD in the […]