• The Divine Comedy – Office Politics

    June 28, 2019 - By 

    Neil Hannon has always been, rather consciously, something of an anachronism in contemporary pop – an urbane, arch throwback to suave crooners and irreverent singer-songwriters of the 1960s. In a way, this made sense in the ’90s, when The Divine Comedy were at their commercial height. After all, Britpop juggernauts Oasis and Blur were fetishists of the ’60s, lifting the Beatles’ and Kinks’ aesthetics from the middle part of that decade; Jarvis Cocker, when not drawing inspiration from Serge Gainsbourg, shared Hannon’s obsession with the wry, literary Scott Walker. But while Albarn and Cocker combined those influences with more contemporary sensibilities, Hannon was a purist –…

  • Emma Langford w/ Nathan O’Regan @ The Duncairn, Belfast

    June 26, 2019 - By 

    It’s almost a little too warm this evening in the Duncairn Centre’s beautiful theatre space. It’s also possible everyone is a little hot under the collar from rushing to the venue, some seasonal marching to the north of Belfast has made getting here on time a challenging proposition and people are still arriving as our host welcomes the crowd and introduces the evening’s support, Nathan O’Regan. Once the Cork-born singer-songwriter takes to the stage it becomes clear his songs are a lesson in measured restraint; it’s obvious he could push his voice harder, that he is more than capable of…

  • Body & Soul 2019 (Sunday)

    June 26, 2019 - By 

    There is a chill in the air as drops of rain pitter-patter down on the tents that litter the grounds of Ballinlough Castle, County Westmeath. The final day of Body and Soul is upon the hordes of punters that have gathered here and for a few, their time is up. Several parts of the campsites now lie vacant, leaving only flattened squares of grass and tiny metal canisters in their place. For those that have stayed there is still a whole slew of acts to be seen. Many early risers linger around the Midnight Circus tent, popping in for shelter…

  • Body & Soul 2019 (Friday)

    June 24, 2019 - By 

    Underneath a blazing sun and azure blue sky hoards of punters are flooding into the fields and woodlands of Westmeath for Body and Soul 2019. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the festival is set to be a weekend rich in arts, culture and music. Across the sprawling fields festival goers begin to settle into their surroundings, consisting of metal fencing, sustainable vegan food vendors and “BRING YOUR TENTS HOME” posters. The sustainability-driven ethos of the festival is omnipresent. For the first few hours, it’s the usual beginning of the festival humdrum: people struggling to set up their tents, eating overpriced hotdogs…

  • Body & Soul 2019 (Saturday)

    June 25, 2019 - By 

    It’s early Saturday morning and the first few fragile souls have emerged from their tents to grab those precious few start of the day necessities: water, a greasy sandwich and a cup of tea. At the same time, there are a few not so fragile souls that have yet to sleep stood in a circle listening to Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’. The classic ‘morning after’ feeling of festival season looms over the campsites of Body and Soul. For those that have managed to pull themselves together in the early hours of the day…

  • Docs Ireland: Gaza

    June 24, 2019 - By 

    Is it strange to surf during a siege? The optics of a modern-day siege, and the visual poetics associated with the Gaza Strip, get scrambled and re-infused in Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane’s Gaza, closing night film of the Docs Ireland festival. Born out of McConnell’s “Gaza Surf Club” photography project, the film is a rare postcard from a desperate shoreline. “There is a barrier separating the people of Gaza from life itself”, muses a theatre performer, who provides poetic commentary on the struggle of those living in the ravaged Mediterranean enclave. Habitually designated as the world’s largest open-air prison, the Strip…

  • Docs Ireland: Diego Maradona

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    There are few football players on the planet that are more famous, or come with more infamy, than Argentina’s Diego Armando Maradona. When you throw this turbulent story into the hands of director Asif Kapadia and the team behind documentary classics Senna and Amy, you know you’re going to be in for an entertaining show. Diego Maradona achieves this right out of the gate, opening with blaring Italo-disco music and early-career party scenes. Primarily, the film gives us the two sides of Maradona; the unassuming and kind Diego; and the other, the wild, aggressive and philandering Maradona. In the early stages, you get a glimpse…

  • Billy Corgan @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    June 23, 2019 - By 

    Billy Corgan (or William Patrick Corgan as he formally likes to be known as these days) has taken an unprecedented opportunity to perform a short tour of Europe alone, airing out new work and well trodden, decades old tunes. It’s a brief sojourn from the Smashing Pumpkins who are in the middle of a somewhat renaissance tour with three of the four original members which he’ll return to in a couple of weeks. Tonight we’re dispensed with a rare intimate show from the magmatic frontman and anticipation as to what facet of his personality we’ll be presented with is palpable.…

  • In Fabric

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    A haunted dress is the kind of premise that even Stephen King at the height of his cocaine period would struggle to make more than a short story out of, and a very silly one at that. But with In Fabric, Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio) uses the conceit to create a deeply sensual and deranged experience that wraps itself around your brain and refuses to let go. As played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Shelia is a reserved and harried woman who yearns for some passion after separating from her husband. The day before a date, she’s convinced to buy…

  • Julia Shapiro – Perfect Version

    June 20, 2019 - By 

    Perfect Version finds Julia Shapiro wrangling with the idea of the self at a tumultuous time in her life, cataloguing the period following her exit from Chastity Belt’s third album tour due to a flustered blend of relationship woes and emotional toil. Facing the mirror to see nothing, she begins to question what it means to be someone at all, to be truly authentic. ‘Parking Lot’ materialises this thought into the daily task of trying to find somewhere to park, unmasking routines as things done out of mere habit rather than because we want to, raising questions about the significance…