• Pigeon & Plum @ Black Box, Belfast

    December 15, 2014 - By 

    It’s Christmas time! That can mean only one thing: PIGEO… Wait, no: family, the birth of baby Jesus and Santa. Okay, the festive season means many, many things but for those of us in the know – namely those of us based in Belfast – it’s time for our favourite vaudeville show, Pigeon & Plum. As I walk into the Black Box I’m instantly taken aback by the astounding transformation it has undergone. It looks like a completely different venue. Drenched in decadence with red velvet and gold fringing, from big details like the antique frame that towers over the…

  • Marillion @ The Forum, London

    December 14, 2014 - By 

    A lot can happen in a quarter of a century. 1989 saw the release of the debut releases of The Stone Roses, Nirvana amongst others. That same year also saw the debut release of Marillion with Steve Hogarth fronting them after the band had taken off to Mushroom Farm Studio near Brighton with a selection of music previously recorded in demo form with Fish. However, when Fish left the band in 1988, he took his lyrics with him, a lot of which ended up on his solo debut, Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors, while Steve Hogarth and John Helmer…

  • Manic Street Preachers @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    December 14, 2014 - By 

    You sometimes have to wonder if people do these “Let’s play the album everyone likes” shows in order to destroy the album. If you’ve made one truly significant album in your lifetime, fair deuce to you, but after a while it must feel like a noose. If you were to do such a show, how would you do it? Could you do it in such a way that puts this awful beauty that hangs over you to rest, while not screwing over the people who’ve connected themselves to the record and provided the opportunity for you to perform this show?…

  • Sun Kil Moon @ The Button Factory

    December 11, 2014 - By 

    There’s a relaxed, seasonal warmth upon entering the Button Factory for tonight’s mostly seated, limited capacity show, which sees Mark Kozelek at possibly the most critically acclaimed stage of his career – almost every song performed tonight comes from the last two years of his career – due in no small part to this year’s Sun Kil Moon LP, the mortality-fixated Benji. With no support act, Kozelek ambles onstage accompanied simply by a keyboardist and electric guitarist, standing with a sole tea-towelled drumstick for his lone tom, holding a straight beat with the intent of a serial killer for the entirety…

  • Elton John @ 3Arena, Dublin

    December 10, 2014 - By 

    Singer, songwriter, straight, gay, father, activist and important enough to a second-tier North London football club to have a stand named after him: Elton John’s certainly led a colourful life. Similar colour in his life show, then, is something of a given. Tonight’s one hundredth show of 2014 and the final date of a tour commemorating 41 year old classic ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ starts with an old school rock n’ roll bent. ‘Funeral For A Friend’ and ‘Bennie and The Jets’ lead the tributes to one of Elton’s finest records, the former preceded by an epic piano lead in which sets the…

  • Morrissey w/ Anna Calvi @ 3Arena, Dublin

    December 3, 2014 - By 

    What an indulgence it must be to be able to gather your gripes together and air them on a grand scale via music, imagery and the written word. Morrissey’s grievances are legion, his ire legendary, and the usual Morrissey-isms are cheerfully present and correct on his latest album World Peace Is None of Your Business. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer; four legs good, two legs bad; an unparalleled sense of self-righteousness – all of these things, already none too subtle on record, are bundled together for tonight’s Dublin crowd into an audio-visual feast of disdain. He…

  • Duke Special @ Bennigan’s, Derry

    December 2, 2014 - By 

    Bennigan’s Bar in Derry serves as the perfect venue for an intimate gig and that was just what Belfast born balladeer, Duke Special, was set to do on Friday night. Although the crowd was set-up to expect a totally warm and soft intimacy from the very start with a toned down piano and voice rendition of Duke’s ‘Freewheel’, there was a quick shift between atmosphere when his hand slamming on the keys brought the Bertolt Brecht cover of ‘Alabama Song’ forcefully to the ears of the audience. No one seemed to be taken aback as I was. Being one of…

  • Little Hours w/ Bairbre Anne @ The Sugar Club, Dublin

    December 1, 2014 - By 

    Serving up a sumptous set of folk-pop sound, the up-and-coming Little Hours delighted Dublin’s Sugar Club with their first headlining gig and eponymous EP launch on Thursday evening. The Donegal duo dazzled the house with a fresh array of work that’s garnered them a worthy following since the release of their first single ‘It’s Still Love’ in June, including a respectable line-up of support acts to play their momentous evening as well. The show was a night of new artists who toil, and an impressive one, at that. Kicking off the evening’s line-up was Dublin’s own Bairbre Anne, promoting new…

  • Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) @ Vicar Street, Dublin

    November 26, 2014 - By 

    The man on stage would like you to call him Yasiin Bey. “Ali, not Clay,” he says. That doesn’t stop the gig’s posters and tickets from bearing the name Mos Def in larger lettering than that of his name of choice, however. Coming on stage around 10pm in an oversized scarf and baggy tee, he opens with ‘Cream of the Planet’, an unreleased track from 2010. Though billed as a fifteenth anniversary celebration of 1999’s breakthrough release Black On Both Sides, the night sees Bey jump from era to era, appropriately enough as 1982’s seminal hip-hop flick Wild Style plays…

  • Robert Plant w/ The Last Internacionale @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    November 25, 2014 - By 

    It’s funny to think that Led Zeppelin spawned practically every rock’n’roll trope that elicits either an eye roll or a “fuck yeah!” (depending one’s state of inebriation). The old clichés have gone from birth through acceptance, weathering punk’s dismissal into irony and meta-referencing, and all the way around again until it’s hard to decipher what point on the rotation things currently fall. New Yorkers The Last Internationale are somewhere on that loop, a band that could comfortably populate the background scenery in Almost Famous, such is the posturing and rock-by-numbers shenanigans that are in progress onstage. The guitarist even gives…