The man in black and amber

Since the autumn of 2005, kilkennymusic.com has been bringing local events to a computer screen near you. Gone are the days of scouring the walls of the town’s (few) record shops and musical instrument stores in search of local gigs, or tweezing the hidden nuggets of information on bands from the token coverage in the local paper. These days, Kilkenny musicians and punters have one reliable place to go to find out about local gigs, promote and sell music, and strike up a bit of locally-themed banter.

“We launched the website in September 2005 with six Kilkenny bands on it, which was enough to get our first gig going,” recalls Ken McGuire, the site’s founder. “Three bands played and we packed out Cleere’s theatre. 79 Cortinaz (interviewed on the previous page) were on the second bill in November. The bands just kept coming… It’s gone into three figures at this stage.”
Since then, the website has become much more than just a gig-finder, evolving into a one stop shop for bands both living in and visiting Kilkenny. At the end of 2006, an alternative music club to encourage larger acts from around the country to come down for stripped-back acoustic sets – the One Take Sessions – was born. The gigs serve as a warm up for other dates the band might have in the area as well as an opportunity to try something different live, while bringing the artist into the folds of the kilkennymusic.com community.
“We’ve got everything set up for them,” says Ken. “We’ll do all the promotion, all the press, all the radio work, we’ll push them on the site, on the podcast, get the photos out, do all the PR around the sessions ourselves. The bands say ‘This is cool!’, then they come down and have a great reaction at the sessions. Last week we had 60 or 70 people in on a Thursday night. It’s a free gig – we don’t charge in and the bands don’t get paid, though they’re perfectly entitled to come along and sell whatever they want, push whatever they want, and if they make money on the night then that’s great. Around a fortnight afterwards, we make CDs of the gigs and give them to the bands, who are free to use the recordings.”
So, loaded with contacts, enthusiasm and technical nous, Ken is pulling the many strands of the local music scene together, weaving them neatly, putting them all in one place and sticking a ‘dot com’ at the end of it.
“That’s pretty much it, yeah,” he confirms. “Our aim was to eventually become that one stop shop. We’re at that stage now where, if a band wants to book a gig, we can say, ‘Ok, let’s book it, let’s promote it, you need engineers, you need gear, oh, you’re recording an EP? That’s grand. We’ll get you studio time, we’ll get you engineers…’ Everything is done in-house. With the likes of Saving J (see URLs Aloud), we got their website going, we look after their MySpace, their YouTube stuff… When they needed artwork and a video for their new single, they came to us, so we got together a storyboard, got the crew, booked the theatre, shot it, edited it locally, and now we’re pushing it online. We’ve also just kicked off a PR wing, so now we’re booking acts from the US and Australia and getting them on nationwide tours, a bit of a circuit for eight or ten days at a time. That’s the next thing.”
One small but crucial question remains: at what point are Ken and his cohorts going to get tired of the local scene and bugger off to the bright city lights in search of bigger things?
“I don’t know,” he muses. “It’s a part-time hobby with full-time hours, and we’ve been joking that we need an eighth day in the week. But at the moment, I’m happy just sitting back in Kilkenny. I don’t see the need to be anywhere else just yet. It’d take a lot to get me out of here.”