Having recently announced a show together at London’s Hyde Park, it’s been announced that Bob Dylan and Neil Young will play Kilkenny next summer. Billed as their only appearance in Ireland, the icons will play the 27,800-capacity Nowlan Park stadium on Sunday, July 14. Tickets – which are priced from €76 – go on sale this Monday at 9am.
Some things never change. There are still people streaming towards the exits long before the end of a Bob Dylan show and tonight is no different. Despite the availability of decades of set lists and live reviews online, the expectation of an acoustic-driven evening of hits prevails among many of the audience sprawled around the cavernous 3 Arena. Here is a Nobel Laureate who can perform at the White House without saying a word to the President of the United States, yet people are disappointed that he fails to acknowledge the audience or the occasion with as much as a…
Six decades, thirty five studio albums and several reinventions in, it has long been a certified fact that Bob Dylan – showing few signs of slowing down at seventy-three – has no-one or nothing left to prove. With his critically-acclaimed thirty-fifth album, Tempest, once more stoking the embers of his altogether extraordinary career, a varied legion of hardened fans and sprightly newcomers to the Sacred Word of Dylan converge to Dublin’s 02 tonight for a concert that could well be filed under the “Mass” on Ticketmaster. The question remains, however: how many of tonight’s mixed audience will leave content having spent top dollar for a show that has little interest in…
It’s strange how, nearly 50 years after someone shouted “JUDAS!” in the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966, Bob Dylan still has the power to provoke a reaction. For many people, he’ll forever be the wiry, electric veined pop-provocateur of the mid 60s, re-writing the rulebook on the way to burning himself out, whilst for others, he’s still the prototype folkie, with his work boots and dirty denims, honking on a harmonica whilst calling out injustice wherever he finds it. Dylan’s 70s records are reasonably well regarded, with 1975’s Blood on the Tracks still remaining the archetypical ‘breakup’ album, and his late…
For myriad reasons, we are sadly unlikely ever to hear a collaboration between prime-period Bob Dylan and Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized at their peak. For one thing, the laws of space and time prevent it – the two acts’ greatest moments occurring some thirty years apart. Damn you, physics! Fans of imaginary musical dream-teams need not despair though, because we have the next best thing in the form of Lost In The Dream, the third album from Philadelphia’s finest pioneers of psychedelic, spaced-out Americana, The War On Drugs. There’s no two ways about it: frontman Adam Granduciel’s voice unmistakably recalls a…
Three further acts have been added to the already hugely impressive festival in Cork with Bob Dylan, Imelda May and Lana Del Rey all confirmed to play. These acts join an already prestigious line-up and include Cliff Richard, Dolly Parton, Tom Jones, Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters, Elbow, Biffy Clyro, Bryan Adams, Pixies, The Prodigy, Christy Moore, Neil Young and Crazy Horse and The National. Tickets for Dylan are €65.50 – €76, €35 for Imelda May and €45 for Lana Del Rey and the dates are June 16, June 21 and July 15 respectively. Tickets go on sale February…
‘Why we Fight’ has always been my favourite episode of HBO’s acclaimed WW2 drama Band of Brothers. It deals with General Eisenhower’s decision to order as many men as possible witness the barbarity of Nazi concentration camps, so as, to help them better understand and rationalise the necessity of their actions during the war. Luckily there are no more wars of that scale and brutality and nothing anyone in my generation does will come close to rivalling what those people endured. We instead live in the most technologically advanced era in human history. We have access to more culture, learning…
We’re humongous fans of poetry here at The Thin Air. As far as we’re concerned, the very best poetry is far superior to a very good song or album – the syllabic genius of a handful of rhyming conquistadors down the ages faring in a realm of incisive mastery that has little to no parallel in any other sphere of the arts. As it so happens, today is National Poetry Day and as we are also humongous fans of lovingly-assembled Spotify playlists of pretty much anything under the recordable sun, we have compiled a fifteen-track playlist of poetry (and music containing…