Other Voices: Songs From A Room director Philip King reacts to news of Sinead O'Connor's retirement from public life - and praises "one of the world's very best singers"
The lyrics on his debut solo album are a revelation, opening up a vanished world in which romance and the supernatural find their way seamlessly into workaday farming and fishing life
There’s more to our national holiday than drowning the shamrock you know. In fact, no matter what your interest, St Paddy’s Day has something to offer.
GEORGE BYRNE joins the stars of stage turned stars of screen at the CORK FILM FESTIVAL as one band's star-crossed story takes another unexpected turn. Snaps: GEORGE BYRNE.
The Walls and The Jimmy Cake do their bit for European unity by bringing their music – and an insatiable appetite for the craic – to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Our reporter Danielle Brigham survives to tell the tale.
Don't write the singular Maria McKee; write the plural Maria McKee instead. Bill Graham encounters a mercurial talent in a variety of moods, musics and memories.
Don’t go, they said. but they didn’t follow their own advice. Now, after much professional and personal upheaval, the Hothouse Flowers are back, once more in love with the idea of “ringin’ the bell”.
With his work on the soundtrack to In The Name Of The Father bringing him into the full glare of media attention Gavin Friday takes this opportunity to put to rest any accusations of riding on U2’s coat-tails. Confident and brimming with ideas for his solo career, The Spotlight Kid gives the lowdown to an eager BILL GRAHAM.
What links Richard Harris with Linda Ronstadt, Art Garfunkel with The Supremes, and Frank Sinatra with er, Ghost Of An American Airman? Why, the music of Jimmy Webb, of course, one of the most widely-respected songwriters of all-time. Here he talks to JOE JACKSON about his friendship with Richard Harris, his encounters with Elvis and his deep-rooted love of Irish music.
In one of the most dramatic developments in Irish music in decades, Sinead O'Connor has said that she will retire from the music business in three months time
It was often emotional stuff of course, but if this was O’ Farrell operating on one third of his lung power and tired after two days of intensive rehearsal, then most of the vocalists on the scene could be thankful for their egos he wasn’t on full throttle.
Never mind the GPO in 1916. For hundreds of years to come, they’ll boast about being in a studio in RTE when The Greatest Irish Band In The World Ever arose from the grave.
CHRISTY HITS the chill-out zone? It’s enough to put the heart across club culturalists and hardcore troubadours alike. Moore’s often bedecked his songs with gaudy tapestries, but on Traveller, in partnership with Leo Pearson, he’s cross-pollinating folk forms with deep space beats, head music and ambient swashes, sticking his neck out further than ever before.
Like Dinsdale Piranha in the old Monty Python sketch, Cathal Coughlan uses sarcasm. Sometimes with a sledgehammer, elsewhere with a stiletto - but he never stoops to the tender, poisoned compliments of polished English irony. Cathal Coughlan is no member of the loyal opposition.
Being a fiendishly appropriate headline for a column in which our hero reveals how easy it is to win an Oscar and offers his suggestion for the ultimate musical instrument of torture. (And no, it’s not the accordion).
A communication from Peter Lundy comes in response to my recent musings about how Irish songwriters might choose to write from their own experience rather than recycling second-hand views
Sinéad O'Connor's records don't necessarily reveal themselves speedily. I know that, on the first hearing, 'The Lion and the Cobra' seemed to me an ill-fitting match of various discordant styles. I didn't really crack it 'till its sixth time round my turntable.
It's almost two years since Sinead O'Connor announced her retirement from music. However, it was always on the cards that she would find her voice again. The good news is that she has. She explains all in an exclusive interview with Niall Stokes...
