• Dublin Bowie Festival 2016

    If there’s three better consecutive words than Dublin Bowie Festival we haven’t heard them. Making its inaugural outing at The Grand Social on Saturday, January 9 and Sunday, January 10, it will celebrate Davy Jones’ musical towering legacy via “live performances, banter, movies, table quiz, collectors merch and more.” With Bowie’s highly-anticipated twenty-fifth album Blackstar set for release the day before the festival’s launch, this is a perfectly-timed opportunity to revisit a bona fide music legend. Go here for more info.

  • Other Voices Live 2015

    Bona fine Irish music institution Other Voices returns to Dingle in Kerry across the weekend of December 4-6 for another stellar, genre-spanning showcase of international and homegrown music. Split between the main event in St. Jame’s Church and the iconic – free – Music Trail (full line-up below), the likes of Low, Gaz Coombes and Richard Hawley will grace the former, whilst some of the very best Irish acts take over the former. Go here to check out full information via the Other Voices website, here to stream our Other Voices Live 2015 Festival Mixtape and here for its Facebook…

  • Preview: Outloud @ Outburst 2015

    As part of this year’s Outburst Arts Festival, the inaugural Outburst: Outloud this Saturday (November 14) will be a day long event of stalls, talks, workshops and music all with a feminist/trans/queer slant. On the day there will be stalls, talks and workshops from Belfast Feminist Network, Hollaback, Sail, GenderJam, Anchor, Reclaim the Night, The Belfast City Rockets and more. There will also be zine-making and lyric-writing workshops, and a discussion based around the play Scorch (which is showing at the Mac). As well as all that there will be loads of bands playing throughout the day with headliners in Edinburgh’s…

  • Sound of Belfast 2015

    With the events running from November 6-14 around the city, this year’s Sound of Belfast will culminate in the presentation of this year’s Oh Yeah Legend Award to The Divine Comedy at the NI Music Prize event at the Mandela Hall on November 14. The festivities include many exhibitions from local artists & filmmakers, as well as conferences and masterclasses at the Oh Yeah Centre. These include the Belfast Urban Affinity 2015, aimed at hard-to-reach youths, and the Breaking Into Music Youth Conference, featuring the likes of Phil Taggart, who quickly progressed from BBC Radio Ulster to Radio 1 in recent years. There’ll be also a…

  • Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2015

    Set to be another ten day celebration of LGBT creative culture, the equal parts bold and brilliant  Outburst Queer Arts Festival will return to Belfast from November 12 to 21. Spanning film screenings, theatre performance, visual art and various special events, the festival this year’s outing features everything from a LGBTQ pop-up book club with Patrick Gale, Genderama – a creative project about gender – OUTBURST: OUTLOUD and HOUSE at the Mac, an unmissable night celebration the New York House Ballroom Community. We’ll be previewing our “must-see” events soon. In the meantime go right here to check out the full listings and check out the…

  • Cork Film Festival 2015

    Bursting with genre-spanning documentaries, features, short film and special events, Cork Film Festival will transform Cork Opera House, Gate Cinema, Triskel Christchurch and Farmgate Cafe into a bustling, heady cinematic fête from November 6 to November 15. Officially Ireland’s oldest film festival and Cork’s flagship cultural happening, the festival will celebrate its grand 60th outing by playing hosting to a wonderfully rich and diverse selection of documentaries, contemporary world cinema, animated films, a talent development campus and categories focusing on music, mental health and food. Check out the official Cork Film Festival 2015 trailer and brochure below.  

  • Lingo Festival 2015

    Ireland’s first and only spoken world festival, Lingo returns to Dublin from Friday, October 16 to Sunday, October 18 to for another week of exceptional performances from fresh voices and spoken word masters from Ireland and much further afield. Organised by some of the Dublin’s most attuned independent promoters, arts curators and spoken word artists, this year’s outing boasts everyone from headliner extraordinaire Saul Williams and experimental poet and playwright Dylan Coburn Gray to UK poet and spoken word artist Hollie McNish and Derry-based performance poet Abby Oliveira. Go here to read our new interview with Saul Williams and here to check…

  • Battle For The Burning Lake Kite & Music Festival

    Despite kicking off at the very beginning of Autumn, Achill Island’s Battle for the Burning Lake festival is set to make the most of a forecast Indian summer over the weekend of September 25-27. With the likes of The Eskies and Daithí set to perform at the annual Co. Mayo celebration, the festival also has watersports – namely kitesurfing at the legendary Keel Lake – at the heart of its programme. Also boasting a funfair and the food village, entry for Friday and Saturday is free during the day for spectators. Check out the full artist line-up below and go here to buy tickets (also…

  • Another Love Story

    There’s supremely intimate, wonderfully cloistered, comprehensively unmissable small festivals, then there’s Another Love Story. Taking place at Killyon Manor, Co. Westmeath across August 21-23,  the “weekend celebration of music, discussion, film, food and friends” boasts a line-up including New Jackson, Loah, Leo Drezden, Come On Live Long, I Have a Tribe, Margie Lewis, Valerie Francis, Ben Bix & Father, Carriages, Tandem Felix and many more. Of course, being much more than a standard music festival, the real lure and magic here is in the one-off happenings and fleeting moment of wonder, full details of which will be announced very soon. In the…

  • Spirit of Folk Festival

    Returning to Co. Meath’s Dunderry Park from September 18-20, Spirit of Folk Festival with a line-up boasting the likes of Mick Flannery (pictured), Inni-K, Carriages and more. As well as music the festival will also include storytelling from national treasures such as Batt Burns, Jack Lynch, Eddie Lenihan, and Aideen Mc Bride, as well as talks and workshops on Ancient Druidism and Shamanism, African song and Dance workshops, Viking Battle Re-enactments, Bicycle Jousting, Yoga, Astronomy and Bushcraft. Festival Director, Natasha Duffy, says of this year’s SOF, “Each year we try and promote as many interesting and unique activities as possible. This year…