• Start a Band

    November 10, 2014 - By 

    Good day, readers! I’m Chris and The Thin Air have kindly provided me with this platform to talk about the wonderful world of touring and other aspects of life in a band. I began touring about seven years ago, the early days consisted mostly of performing to tiny amounts of people, being broke and sleeping on floors or in vans. Since then there has been no catapult to superstardom, more a gradual yet steady progression in my touring lifestyle and in many ways I feel very fortunate for this, as it has helped me develop a resilience to a lot…

  • Meb Jon Sol: Worried Man, in A

    July 29, 2014 - By 

    I pressed the dusty keys of the old upright near the entrance of the barn. It let out a brace of discordant notes in the close summer heat and left little finger silhouettes in the dirt on the ivory. ’I shouldn’t be here,’ I thought, ‘and it won’t be long until I’m found out.’ The barn was out the back of a farmhouse around the back roads of Leitrim. It had been converted into a studio, but it seemed to have fought valiantly against the conversion. Rusting car parts and stumped farm tools scattered around the stony garden surrounding the…

  • Meb Jon Sol: Bound For Glory

    July 14, 2014 - By 

    I pulled my cap further down my brow and buried my face deeper in my scarf to shelter from the biting cold. It had been threatening to snow all day but so far only delivered misty rain that cascaded down in brilliant sheets through the winter night. First came a pair of headlights, piercing the rain grey. Soon the entire shape of the lorry tore around the McKenzie roundabout I was standing on, shuttling at a speed which I feared would cause it to topple over on top of me. The driver maneuvered the roundabout with ease, circling and parking…

  • Everything Sucks #009: Garth Brooks

    July 8, 2014 - By 

    So, the news has just broke that country-pop superstar and apparent one-man economic stimulus package Garth Brooks has decided that the cash-in he was offered from a willing fanbase, that queued up for days in some cases and doubled occurrences of carpal tunnel syndrome refreshing their browsers, wasn’t good enough. After having two shows pulled owing to the objections of residents who have better things to do than have their front yards pissed in, the man himself issued an ultimatum that it was all the money he was initially offered, or he’d find some other backwoods to warm up for…

  • Meb Jon Sol: The Art of Fanciful Begging

    June 23, 2014 - By 

    I felt someone step over me in dark. They slipped quietly out the door and it shut behind them with a soft click, extinguishing the thin strip of light from the hallway that had briefly appeared, casting the room back into darkness. I pulled the sleeping bag tight around me and rolled over, negotiating a fleeting moment of comfort with the unforgiving wooden floor. The room was already stuffy with the early morning heat. I could tell the figure leaving that morning was tense, and I was the reason. I couldn’t blame them. They had generously offered their floor as…

  • Forty Years of Phantom of the Paradise

    June 11, 2014 - By 

    We open on a blood red, pixilated screen, so tightly rotoscoped that Ken Morse must have had to have a lie down afterwards. As the camera twists away we hear the urgent and distinctly imitable voice of Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling telling the tale of Swan (“he has no other name”), sonic savant and pop pioneer, the man who “brought the blues to Britain and Liverpool to America.” As the camera uncorks, a right handed thread, to a chorus of whining synthesizers, we find that Swan is looking to inaugurate his own Xanadu: “The Paradise – the ultimate rock palace”.…

  • Meb Jon Sol: Four More Fish

    June 6, 2014 - By 

    When the battle lines had been drawn a ripple of laughter broke out among the the groups of lads gathered on the playing fields at Lover’s Retreat. It echoed around the high trees that loomed over the banks of the Camowen river at the edge of the pitch. The teams were unintentionally split straight through the middle of Northern Ireland’s religious divide. It was reflective of the past and the present of a perpetually confusing country: together but still separated. ‘Hold on, we’re one down and yous have an extra.’ a voice from our team remarked. ‘Simon, you go with…

  • Music Matters: Living Through Sound

    June 4, 2014 - By 

    In my humble opinion, one of life’s greatest pleasures is when you see an utterly fantastic film for the first time – and the soundtrack fits. Not only does it fit; it enhances the viewing experience by adding an aural dimension to the atmosphere, an extra quality that engages your attention above and beyond the cinematography. Conversely, I find it intensely frustrating when my mind chooses to dub over the score or soundtrack with something else…and it fits better. This could come down to some latent talent that would be best employed in film production, or it could boil down…

  • Meb Jon Sol: Pay No Heed To Tripod

    May 25, 2014 - By 

    The gig was in a small cafe outside of a town called Clifden, situated on the outskirts of everything, separated from the rest of Ireland (and seemingly the rest of the world) by the wild, unrelenting Connemara landscape. On the door was a rain-sodden poster that played fast and loose with the truth: ‘The much acclaimed Meb Jon Sol’- well at least they were expecting me. I walked up the stairs and into the Cafe. Folks were gathered eating, drinking and enjoying the panoramic view of the bay. It was mid afternoon but the sky was darkening with creeping rain…

  • Cork Heads: Pretty Handsome Studio

    June 3, 2014 - By 

    In the second installment of her wonderfully-titled column Cork Heads – looking at some of the brightest sparks in Cork’s currently thriving arts scene – photographer Brid O’Donovan talks to Billy ‘Pretty Boy’ Browne and Roisin ‘Handsome’ Hanley from Pretty Handsome Studio, a project that combines the DIY aesthetic of screen printing with inspired musings and doodlings in a mission to produce the finest t-shirts, designs and prints for your wondering eyes to feast on. [How it all started] Billy: We were in college together, studying design communication in CIT. We were friends and then we got together at the end of first…