Northern Ireland
aleks.sierz
Niall is unwell. Very unwell. Very, very. There’s a lot going on in his head. He can’t really hold things together. Evidence? Well, he’s lost his job and his girlfriend Natalie has left him. So, as desperation increases, he decides to phone his big sister Brigid – the trouble is, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.When he wakes her up he’s a bit tongue-tied, and things go badly. Very badly. He’s not very good at small talk and she’s upset about being disturbed (someone is staying the night with her). They hang up, and the next thing he does is set fire to his hand. The consequences of this Read more ...
David Nice
Dublin theatregoers have been inundated with Irish family gatherings concealing secrets or half-buried sorrows, mixing “bog gothic” with very real horrors. Clearly they’re willing to try again with Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, because its run has just been extended. The vanishings familiar to Butterworth’s wife Laura Donnelly, whose uncle was among the disappeared, still resonate, as a programme article by Sandra Peake, CEO of WAVE Trauma Centre, reinforces.In the London premiere (vividly reviewed on theartsdesk by Aleks Sierz), Donnelly played Caitlin Carney, who along with son Oisin has Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In many ways, 2024 has been a stellar year for New Music. There have certainly been plenty of albums released that could easily have gained “year’s best” status in recent times and would have buried those that actually did receive those plaudits.Veteran artists like the Very Things, Peter Perrett and Les Amazones d’Afrique all put out career highlights. As did plenty of bands who finally found their feet after making initial tentative steps, such as Aussie pub rockers Amyl and the Sniffers, political punk-rappers Bob Vylan and French-Moroccan psychedelicists Bab L’Bluz. However, the record Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A few recent documentaries have challenged the definition of the genre through the cheerful and wholesale dramatic reconstruction of past events, key moments that weren’t captured by a camera at the time.This is unnerving to those of us brought up on old-school public broadcast TV where the rule was that even when what the director had put on screen was obviously a reenactment, a caption indicating "dramatic reconstruction" was obligatory. Not only did that mealy-mouthed phrase clutter the image, no matter which arty font was used, it also broke the viewer’s full engagement with the moment, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Original pressings of Love And Poetry sell for up to £2,800. Copies of the August 1969 debut album by Andwellas Dream can sometimes also be found for £700, a relative bargain in the context of the upper limit of the prices the collector’s market has settled on.There were two follow-up albums – each credited to Andwella. August 1970’s World's End fetches around £40 to £80; People's People, issued in late 1970, attracts prices of £50 to £100. Cult stuff then, with interest centred on that first album. And where there’s such appeal, repressings follow. Love And Poetry was first reissued in 1995 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If there’s a feeling of déjà vu, it isn’t detectable. Conchúr White played St Pancras Old Church in April 2016 with County Armagh’s Silences, the band he fronted. This evening, a mention of having been here before is absent. Nothing in the body language suggests any familiarity with where he’s playing.Perhaps paying no heed to history is understandable. Conchúr – pronounced Conor – White is in London following the January release of Swirling Violets, the follow-up album to his 2021 self-issued solo debut. He, presumably, views where he is now as a clean break with a past which doesn’t need Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to police procedural perfection, it would be hard for season two to reach the same heights. Overall, it doesn’t, though there are still special moments.After an exhilarating start, its multiple narrative strands thrash around like eels in a tank. We are back at the response unit in the old Belfast nick, though with a new recruit and a couple of old faces unexpectedly returning. [Spoiler alert for those who didn’t watch season one and ought to.] But the tightness of the writers’ grip has slackened.It’s a year on, and the rookie cops have bedded in. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just one, but two Santas in this agreeable seasonal romp. It’s set in small-town Northern Ireland, where single mum Patricia (Laura Donnelly) is struggling to bring up her two young sons, Mikey (Bamber Todd) and Sean (Joshua McLees). Her job at the Stuff for a Pound shop is barely keeping food on the family table, her boss Mr Brady (Lloyd Hutchinson) is a bully and a liar, and her son Mikey is exhibiting anti-social tendencies (by blowing up the school Christmas tree, for instance).A wonderful life it isn’t, but it suddenly becomes a bit more exciting when the local Ballycopse Bank is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
David Ireland’s Edinburgh Fringe hit Ulster American is essentially a play about a play that a Hollywood big name has been cast in by a leading English theatre director. Appropriately, it stars two actual Hollywood “big names”, Woody Harrelson and Andy Serkis, the latter seen here for once without motion-capture tags or prosthetics. Welcome back.The setting is a typical middle-class period house In London, gutted and expensively decorated, where Leigh (Serkis, pictured below left) is preparing for a meeting with the Oscar-winning star of his latest production, Jay Conway (Harrelson, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s always encouraging to a have a musical rallying call in times of political strife. A song for a better future to encourage those on the right side of history not just to march but to dance as well.As Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist of a century or so ago, once said: “A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having”, and this is clearly a view shared by Belfast DJ and producer David Holmes. For Blind on a Galloping Horse is no po-faced, muscular call to burn everything down. Instead, it is a compassionate song of hope that praises those “dreamers, misfits, radicals Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Northern Irish rockers Ash appeared in the mid-Nineties, channelling The Ramones when the UK was in thrall to either bangin’ club music or Britpop. They had a good commercial run, longer than almost all their contemporaries, mustering 18 Top 40 UK hits, their last in 2007 (although their albums still usually make the grade). Their eighth studio album is their most heavy rock since 2004’s Meltdown, unashamedly embracing epic riffery. The best of it is an enjoyable romp.Which is not to say that it’s all loveable. Their trademark power pop harmonies are in place, but sometimes there’s a polish Read more ...
joe.muggs
The broken beat movement, centred on West London around the turn of the millennium, wasn’t super press friendly. Its complex rhythms were eclipsed in the populism stakes by its close cousin UK garage, and serious commentators didn’t really know what to do with a broadly working class, multicultural scene that was aspirational and privileged virtuosic production and musicianship. Indeed there was a distinct inverted snobbery in the refusal refusal to treat it with the respect afforded other electronic music which fit into a scholarly vs “street” dichotomy.The movement itself, which could Read more ...