'An infrequent conversation between fans of music, some of it long-lost’
The Underground Bar on Dublin’s Dame Street was a lap dancing club the last time I passed it by but, in its pomp, the downstairs dive was a centre of excellence for some of the best new bands to emerge in Ireland from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Sack, Power of Dreams and Into... Continue Reading →
Fanning Sessions My mother died almost one year ago and my family will mark that first anniversary as she’d have wanted: a quiet mass for the handful, a decent feed afterwards and then a long trade of general tittle-tattle during which we’ll remind ourselves of the quirks that set her apart and the exacting standards... Continue Reading →
One of the more pleasing aspects to The Trashcan Sinatras’ recent live appearance in Dublin’s Workman’s Club was the size of the crowd. Although the show was a fully seated one and the space in the room curtailed as a result, it was still sold out well in advance of the band’s return to a... Continue Reading →
Johnny Marr’s kept his Into Paradise hang-ups very quiet, hasn’t he ? The Dublin band, who endured for the guts of a decade from the mid-1980s, were one of the first acts signed to Keith Cullen’s then-fledgling Setanta Records imprint and paved a path on many levels for a far better known slew who... Continue Reading →
I spent many, many hours with the excellent Dublin band, Into Paradise, devising numerous schemes and strategies intended to bring them in from the cold but that only ultimately moved them further out into the margins. Through the madness, I remember fondly the time I spent as the band’s butler, a bit like Scooter from... Continue Reading →
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