'An infrequent conversation between fans of music, some of it long-lost’
Ah, revisionism and nostalgia: you’d want to be careful when that pair collide. Last Monday, the Irish Times newspaper carried a fine, first person memoir by Conor Pope to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the release of The Sawdoctors’ second single, ‘I Useta Lover’, one of the more distinctive Irish pop songs of the 1990s... Continue Reading →
I was twenty-one years old when I spent the second half of 1989 on a JI visa in New England. I’d fetched up in a small city ninety miles outside of Boston looking to do as many shifts as I could in a local restaurant and trying to squirrel away a few bob, and I... Continue Reading →
The ‘Self Aid’ live concert that took place in Dublin’s Royal Dublin Society showgrounds on May 17, 1986, is unprecedented in the history of popular entertainment in Ireland. Never has such a high-profile, high-end indigenous line-up been assembled on the same bill: ‘Self Aid’ was headlined by U2 and also featured short live sets by... Continue Reading →
Word that a new Power of Dreams album is on its way comes as a nice surprise to long-time fans and nostalgics who hopped the bus with them as far back as 1988. I’m not sure if anyone, least of all the band itself, expects this fresh body of work to shake the world or... Continue Reading →
Brendan Bowyer, who has died in Las Vegas at the age of eighty-one, was Ireland’s first pop music superstar and is easily one of the most influential figures in the entire history of Irish entertainment. As lead singer with The Royal Showband, and subsequently The Big 8, the Waterford-born singer and musician was a formidable... Continue Reading →
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