• 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…

  • In The Meadows at Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin

    June 11, 2024 - By 

    Despite royally messing it up at the end, All Tomorrow’s Parties showed us that, with the right heads at the helm, bands can be entrusted to curate their very own festival – often with spectacular results. In the here and now, the inaugural edition of In The Meadows, curated by rightly the most beloved Irish band of a generation, Lankum, summons that precise spirit while packing in a magic all its own. After a heady, wonderfully omnipresent period following the release of their universally-lauded fourth album False Lankum, Lankum’s only Irish show of the year, closing out the main East…

  • Gary Numan at Limelight 1, Belfast

    May 22, 2024 - By 

    It’s almost 45 years to the day since Gary Numan appeared with Tubeway Army in one of the all-time memorable Old Grey Whistle Test performances, promoting the then-new album Replicas. The band, led by some shamanic, androgynous alien cyborg, felt like a transmission of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders as imagined by William Gibson or Philip K. Dick. A totem for the lost and alienated, his words sought out glimpses of humanity and connection in the darkest corners of a dystopia caused by the excesses of technology, and this was reflected in the music, a literal post-punk antithesis to the…

  • Other Voices 2023

    December 6, 2023 - By 

    Other Voices drew the best of Irish music to Dingle, Co. Kerry for three days of intimate performances, secret sessions and a vibrating air of magic. Now in its twenty-second year, it maintains its position as a stand-out music festival full of surprises, facilitating close access to unique performances by and for music lovers. Lines are blurred between musician and music lover, bringing a special element to the weekend that differentiates it from any other music festival. Renowned for creating a pocket of magic in Dingle every December, this year’s festival was no different.  With lit streets and pub doors…

  • Arctic Monkeys at SSE Arena, Belfast

    October 17, 2023 - By 

    There’s nothing like a sold-out arena gig to remind you that online discourse is only a small part of any artist’s story. Viewed from behind a screen, Arctic Monkeys’ headline set at Glastonbury this year appeared divisive. ‘The new songs are boring’, ‘Alex Turner’s affectations have gone too far’, ‘they’ve lost their mojo’. Try telling that to the thousands of adoring fans inside a sold-out arena tonight. The crowd is young – astonishingly so for a band with nearly two decades under its belt and seven albums, the last two of which have been daringly, even deliberately uncommercial. The Arctic…

  • Dispatches From A Field: All Together Now 2023

    August 10, 2023 - By 

    Mike Ryan reports back from Sugababes, Iggy Pop, Beak>, Villagers and more at the latest and greatest All Together Now to date. Photos by Celeste Burdon All Together Now returned last weekend for its fourth instalment, and with the memory of last year’s stellar line-up still fresh in people’s minds, it was always going to have an uphill battle to impress returning punters. It didn’t help matters that on Friday night that hill was covered in mud and into 50km winds. But before the weather turned, the evening got off to a rocking start. After an impressive set in one…

  • Pulp at St. Annes Park, Dublin

    June 13, 2023 - By 

    Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel? Or just 20,000 people standing in a field? Well, it was both on Friday night as, nearly thirty years after the practically perfect Different Class was released, that future became the present for the thousands of people in St Anne’s Park in Dublin. And this time round we really understood what the feeling was – utter joy that Jarvis Cocker hasn’t changed at all and Pulp with their ‘This is What We Do for an Encore’ tour, delivered exactly what we wanted. Full of promise from the minute it’s…

  • Sugababes at Botanic Gardens, Belfast

    May 31, 2023 - By 

    Almost a year after their return as one of the unexpected hits at Glastonbury, when such a crowd turned up that entry to the Avalon gig had to be shut to any more fans, Sugababes brought their summer festivities to Belfast on Friday night, as part of the Live at Botanic Gardens series of concerts. While I never had the joy of seeing them the first time around (my hero then was Morrissey as opposed to fun pop girl bands, but sure, we live and learn) I can’t imagine that this original line-up, known for some years by the altogether less…

  • Unthank : Smith at Empire Music Hall, Belfast

    March 29, 2023 - By 

    Paul Smith and Rachel Unthank reimagine radical futures through the lens of traditional folk and new songs from and about the north of England during a spellbinding Monday evening in the Empire Music Hall. Shape-shifting arrangements veer from unaccompanied close harmony to mesmerising full band jazz-inflected work-outs. Alex Neilson from free-improvisation folk group Trembling Bells provides an eerie psych-folk backdrop on drums. Accompaniment on clarinet is provided by Faye McCalman from avant-jazz group Archipelago. The Maximo Park frontman adds a sharp pop nous to the songs from their recent record Nowhere and Everywhere – performed in its entirety tonight. The…

  • Scooter at 3Arena, Dublin

    December 6, 2022 - By 

    Rave music in the mid-nineties always seemed otherworldly to me and its connoisseurs were as alien as the sounds. Tropical hot Summers with swarms of lads buzzing and cycling through the area with haircuts like sweaty spider legs crushed under the weight of a baseball cap. Postman Pat sweets, Tangle Twisters and a can of Lilt for 36p. Booted out of the house to play on the road but instead melting the black tarmac lines with a magnifying glass while a half-licked ice cream dripped down my legs. I’d stare for hours aimlessly at galaxies forming in oil stains left…