• Open Ear 2024 at Sherkin Island

    June 10, 2024 - By 

    “Lads, do you know anywhere I could hear some progressive techno? I could go some music I can’t fucken understand. Tell you wha, fer the price of the ticket, I’ll buy a cement mixer, a big bag of ket, and play for ye all fucken weekend.” – The dose of Tralee.  It was around a nine-hour drive, stopping off at every Circle K en route from Belfast to Sherkin and Open Ear Festival. Meant we missed Gnod, but with four in a car you can’t ensure everyone has been doing their Kegels. I had stolen one of those wee blue…

  • Gibraltar: The Gates of Hell. Twinned with Ballymena

    February 8, 2023 - By 

    Like every fervently masturbating gamer with a penchant for online poker, a nappy and a shut-in level of social ineptitude – I’ve become a retail trader of stocks. The gamification of finance on apps like eToro has made it such that you can easily understand the white sheets (if you can be bothered to read them) and you can doomscroll the comments for ‘picks’ and to remind yourself that men are the literal worst. ‘Bears’ or ‘Bulls’ adds a beautiful homoerotic wink to the pink-sword measuring duel that is the world of online traders. There’s a cosmic explosion anytime a…

  • The Mandlebrot Set

    November 29, 2022 - By 

    You know that equation in Fractal Mathematics, The Mandlebrot Set? When a formula is applied, an organic form that looks a bit like a cockroach repeats itself into infinity? Male comics in Ireland today. How these sentient Reddit threads stop masturbating over Meme Stocks long enough to sell out shows at the SSE Arena, is beyond me. The Positive Spide was probably my favourite male comic from Belfast. He would get in his car and shout out the window to people in a working-class, aggressive Belfast accent things like – “What’s for ye won’t go by ye!!” “If you’re feeling…

  • Don’t Go To The American Bar

    October 11, 2022 - By 

    My mate was in the paper a while back, having been thrown out of the Stormont grounds for taking their pet goat on a walk up the hill. Not a euphemism. Or a Michael Stone ‘Performance Art’ piece. I was in The American Bar in Belfast the other night when some of the staff had just come back from one of those big reach-around business awards, having won ‘The Best Bar’. The American Bar is the sort of place that would let you bring your pet goat in for a pint. Just don’t let it up on the table, or eat…

  • I Went to Garth Brooks and It Was Great

    September 21, 2022 - By 

    Let me start this by saying that I’m from The Moy. You know Garth Brooks’ songs by osmosis. They’re in the sheep dip and the wee bottles of McGuigans. We all stand around burning piles of household waste, out the back field, learning them with our cousinwifes. I went with my sister, we both live in Belfast or thereabouts and have the sort of fractured relationship that everyone has when they grow up in a household of people. I can distinctly remember learning all the songs on In Pieces (I had to look up the name of this album as it…