Brian Reddin’s recent television documentary, ‘How Ireland Rocked the ‘80s’, was a fond, archive-driven spin through the decade in which emerging new groups could be routinely found in every townland and village of the country. For the record, I commissioned ‘How Ireland Rocked the ‘80s’ for RTÉ and was the editorial representative across it. This... Continue Reading →
THE PRODUCERS
Recent books by the U2 singer, Bono, and the influential British producer, Trevor Horn, use the same framework and are built to the same basic specification. And like their authors, they both hark back to an era in the creation of popular music that might well be passing, or that may have already sailed by.... Continue Reading →
HOW IRELAND ROCKED THE 80s.
The report of the McNamee Commission, a body that looked at how the GAA conducted its affairs and outlined a possible future for the association, was published in December, 1971. At the GAA’s annual Congress eight years later, Director General Seán Ó Síocháin, told delegates that ‘the McNamee Commission had crystallised much of the new... Continue Reading →
KENNY LEE: THE KING OF CLUBS
Anyone who claims to have come of age in Cork during the 1980s and 1990s will have at least one story about Kenny Lee, the businessman, promoter and impresario whose death at the age of 84 was announced earlier this week.
BONO – SURRENDER: 40 SONGS, ONE STORY
‘Surrender’ opens with Bono on a gurney in an up-market American medical facility in 2016, eye-balling the physician who’s about to crack open his chest. ‘I have an eccentric heart’, the singer writes wryly, one he spends the guts of a fine, meaty autobiography trying to define. Busy with detail and as rich with candid testimony as it is with relentless name-dropping, ‘Surrender’ is an unpacking of that heart from inside a travelling salesman’s suitcase.
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