• We’ve Only Just Begun at Whelan’s, Dublin

    August 13, 2024 - By 

    We’ve Only Just Begun is a tonic in music festival form, created to celebrate the wealth of musical talent possessed by women and non-binary artists of Ireland. Taking place in Whelan’s over a balmy mid-August weekend, showcased a mere fraction of feminine musical power on the island. Comprising both Whelan’s upstairs and main stages, the festival boasts alumni ranging from Soda Blonde and Sorcha Richardson to SPRINTS and Cathy Davey. This year’s line-up included Choice Music Prize nominee Ezra Williams, 2FM Rising Star Qbanna and radio presenter and musician Rachel Mae Hannon. A report published by research activist group Why…

  • 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…

  • Sinead O’Brien at Cyprus Avenue, Cork

    October 28, 2022 - By 

    Fresh off the release of her debut album Time Bend And Break The Bower, Sinead O’Brien brings her hypnotic performance and affecting spoken-word lyricism to Cork’s Cyprus Avenue. Blending apocalyptic soothsaying with mythological allegory, O’Brien’s lyrics create a profound experience on their own, but combined with the driving guitar and drums of her band (Julian Hanson and Oscar Robertson) they create an aural meditation that washes over you before hitting you in the gut. Recent tracks like ‘End Of Days’ and ‘Most Modern Painting’ get the set going as O’Brien draws the crowd closer to the stage. On stage she…

  • Dreamachine at Carlisle Memorial Church, Belfast

    July 28, 2022 - By 

    “Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.” Six years before Timothy Leary wrote these words in his seminal 1966 text, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Brion Gysin quite literally saw the light. On a bus journey to Marseille, the British-Canadian artist-inventor had an encounter that could be described as a pretty textbook psychedelic experience — one without the aid of psychotropic drugs, foundational Tibetan guides or anything in between. As the setting sun cut through rapidly-passing trees, Gysin shut his eyes before observing what he called “a…

  • Mitski at Vicar Street, Dublin

    April 27, 2022 - By 

    A large white wooden door hangs in the centre of the stage. Five musicians dressed in black step into position. Mitski begins to sing a capella, her haunting vocals emanating from the wings while her band members take the stage. She appears dressed in long, white flowing garments. Immediately, the crowd are in awe. Beginning with ‘Love Me More’ and ‘Should Have Been Me,’ she circles the stage, frantically, as if searching for a lost lover. Airy organs float above a wall of sound, as a tight rhythm section cuts through layers of keys and synths. She races in a…

  • La Bohème @ Carlisle Memorial Church, Belfast

    September 28, 2021 - By 

    “Love, alone command me!” The venue for Northern Ireland Opera’s comeback opera after eighteen months of Covid-19-inflicted anxiety, lockdown and isolation was different – an abandoned 19th century church, as opposed to the Grand Opera House. The socially distanced crowd in this former place of worship was small – ninety instead of the usual thousand that typically pack Belfast’s opera house. But one thing had not changed in the interminable, surreal interim – NI Opera’s capacity to deliver a world class show. Giacomo Puccini’s enduringly popular La Bohème may have seemed like a safe bet for the full-scale debut of…

  • Myles Manley – Cometh The Softies

    November 27, 2020 - By 

    Myles Manley’s new album has been a long time coming. After a series of EPs earlier in the decade, along with ironically titled compilation Greatest Hits 2012-13, the last few years have only seen occasional singles emerge from the hive, though his live shows have promised plenty, with a string of new songs and a sterling three piece band lineup completed by Chris Barry and Solamh Kelly – the former expertly juggling guitar, bass and keys, while the latter takes his place as one of the country’s most impressive drummers, full of jerky, jazz-inflected rhythms across a kit that even…

  • This Is How We Fly @ Solstice Arts Centre, Navan

    January 17, 2020 - By 

    The setting is unusual for This is How We Fly’s gig at Navan’s Solstice Arts Centre. It isn’t the circle of chairs, perhaps forty, that surround the musicians. In-the-round-concerts, after all, are not uncommon. It’s the fact that the audience is on the stage with the musicians. Through a gap in the curtain the empty theatre is discernible. It feels like a private party. TIHWF was brought together by fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, in what all thought would be a one-off gig at the 2010 Dublin Fringe festival. Swiftly approaching its first decade together, the simpatico between Ó Raghallaigh, reeds…

  • Villagers w/ Aldous Harding @ Iveagh Gardens, Dublin

    July 15, 2019 - By 

    It’s an overcast but stiflingly warm evening as concert-goers begin to filter into Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens. Amongst this crowd is a varied mix of personnel. Business types still clad in their work attire, pensioners dressed like pensioners and a select few younger audience members that either appear to have been dragged along by their parents or are decked out in tola vintage streetwear. An eclectic crowd, to say the least. As a decent amount of punters settle in on the grass, New Zealand-born singer-songwriter Aldous Harding takes to the stage with her band. There has been a lot of buzz…

  • John Cooper Clarke @ Ulster Hall, Belfast

    May 1, 2019 - By 

    “It’s let’s see who’s still alive in Belfast night”, the fifty-something-year-old man said, entering the foyer of the Ulster Hall. For the city’s former punks any gig by the movement’s old guard is reason to turn out, even it if is for a poetry night. John Cooper Clarke, to be fair, is no ordinary poet. Since the 1970s, Salford’s punk-poet extraordinaire has surfed the highs and lows of an unfashionable business, rhyming and riffing on everything from sperm tests and inner-city poverty to the crumbling NHS, metrosexuals and Bono’s stolen trousers. At seventy, this great satirist is perhaps more relevant…