• Everything Sucks #002: Sweet ’95 – The Retortening

    Looking at Dan Hegarty’s column on 1995 recently here on this site, I found that, for all the reminiscing on things like Britpop (which sucked, by and large, not that we knew better) and the WWF of the day (more on that later), it was summarily A Very Good Time for Irish music. Not as fervent and fertile as today’s jubilant mass of DIY gigs and indie labels, but a far cry from the marginalisation of independent and non-commercial music that had gone on a generation previous, where people like Phil Lynott were thrown out of the showband system that…

  • Dan Hegarty: Sweet 95

    It was a time when the Blur Vs Oasis nonsense was reaching its peak; the Battle of Britpop as it was called. Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart was WWF (now WWE) Champion, and it would be just a number of years before Irish Rugby fans would become familiar with a man by the name of Brian O’Driscoll. Kerbdog – ‘Sally’   1995 was a year when the grit of what was known as grunge had been replaced by the aforementioned Britpop bands of varying merit. While on these shores bands like Rollerskate Skinny, Whipping Boy, Kerbdog, and Watercress were doing their respective…