• So Long, Leonard Cohen

    November 11, 2016 - By 

    To suggest that the life of Leonard Cohen was anything short of remarkable would be an understatement by anyone’s standards. Poet, songwriter, accidental fashionista, Buddhist monk, wheeler and dealer, lover and friend, forever a gentleman, and never far from the sharpened edges of comedic wit, the man lived as great men do – with a profound love for the beautiful things, an acceptance of the inevitable, and an enthusiasm to share it all with a world in desperate need of something with which to relate. Leonard Cohen has been known as the songwriter’s songwriter since his debut release Songs of…

  • Treasures & a Cup of Tae: A tribute to Martin A. Egan.

    March 8, 2016 - By 

    Last November we sadly said goodbye to a well loved character and champion of Irish culture, Martin A. Egan. Musician, author, artist, poet, raconteur and most importantly a friend- Martin had many strings to his quare aul bow. In a special tribute to his life and work, we’ve compiled reminiscences from friends, family and musicians who felt his influence and his loss with equal impact. Pop the kettle on and have a cup of tae in his honour. “I first met Martin Egan when Planxty played on The Aran Islands in 1972. He sailed out to Kilronan with Mary Coughlan and…

  • A Tribute to John Mills (Panda Kopanda)

    June 12, 2014 - By 

    On Friday, May 30 I received a phonecall to tell me that, after suffering with leukaemia since the turn of the year, my closest friend was now considered beyond medical help and would be dead within a couple of hours. This big, mountainous human being was drawing his last breaths and I could only sit and wait for the next phonecall to confirm such a grim inevitable. It turned out he had quite a few breaths left in him and he would keep us waiting until the following day. But in the end, that end came – much too soon…

  • Spaceman: A Harry Nilsson Tribute Playlist

    January 15, 2014 - By 

    Twenty years ago today – in January 15, 1994 – the towering, thoroughly one-of-a-kind musical genius of one Harry Nilsson fizzled out for good in a home in Agoura Hills, California. At the age of just 52 years old, the New York singer-songwriter bid farewell to a plain that he documented and distilled so incisively and astutely not only via his extremely eclectic original compositions but also in his various collaborations and innumerable reworkings of music written by peers and legends alike. Perhaps most famous for a song that he did not write – the timeless ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ from Midnight Cowboy…

  • That’s The Story of my Life – The Life and Death of Lou Reed

    October 28, 2013 - By 

    When all is said and done, Lou Reed was never the easiest figure to love. For someone who is so intrinsic to the very notion of what we consider popular music to be, for someone who tore up the rulebook so fundamentally and set us all free, it’s rarely been an easy ride. And now that he has moved on, that journey will only become more difficult. Like all the truly great artists, to be “into” Lou Reed is to be “into” a variety of different personas, of different masks, of different ideologies. The snarling twenty-something, sunglasses strapped permanently to…

  • Lou Reed: A Tribute Playlist

    October 27, 2013 - By 

    Arguably punk’s greatest ancestor, Velvet Underground founder and uncompromising solo artist and collaborator for the last five decades, Lou Reed has passed away the age of 71. One of the finest songwriters of the twentieth century (and, for many, beyond) his songs and art traversed genre, sentiment and style, dividing critics and fans from his 1972 self-titled effort right up his notoriously at odds collaboration with Metallica in 2011. From heroin and the NYC underground to Diet Coke and t’ai chi, Reed came a long way from the sixties, constantly re-affirming his right to be restless and fearlessly re-inventing his musical manifesto…

  • Obituary: Seamus Heaney

    September 2, 2013 - By 

    ‘Earth receive an honoured guest..’ The opening of Auden’s famous tribute to Yeats, with its distinctive rhythm which Heaney dubbed ‘Wystan Auden’s metric feet’ seems appropriate as the poet makes his final journey back into the landscape that inspired so much of his best work. For Heaney was a poet formed out of the claggy clay of his home, not just an Irish poet, or a Belfast poet, but a mid-Ulster poet. In his work I recognise the expressions and above all the accent that I grew up with, its mix of the clumsy and the lyrical, ‘demesnes stalked out in consonants’, flooded by…