THE RETURN OF THE ROD SQUAD

The going could be rough enough down in Cork during the mid 1980s, but whenever you wanted to feel thoroughly out of your depth, you’d just remind yourself that Roddy Frame wrote and recorded the first, magical Aztec Camera album, ‘High Land, Hard Rain’ when he was still a teenager. Whatever about the power and... Continue Reading →

DOLORES O’RIORDAN: 1971 – 2018.

During the first series of the RTÉ music show, ‘No Disco’, the presenter, Donal Dineen and myself travelled west to Limerick on a couple of occasions to pick up long interviews that we’d use to populate what was, in essence, a niche video clip show. And because the show didn’t have a bob in its... Continue Reading →

U2 AND THE ARC

In December, 1992, the Cork-born showband singer, Tony Stevens, sustained multiple injuries when the van in which he was travelling back home after a show in the West of Ireland was involved in a serious road collision. He spent the best part of a year recovering in hospital, endured many subsequent years when he was physically unable to... Continue Reading →

FRANKED

Now that 'We Are The Young Men', the new Frank And Walters single and the first cut lifted from the group's forthcoming album, Songs For The Walking Wounded, has been sent out into the wider world, I’m going back over twenty-five years to a cracking live show of theirs in The College Bar in U.C.C. in late 1990.... Continue Reading →

THE CRANBERRIES: THE FIRST REVIEW

Strange as it sounds now but there was a time when The Cranberries were easily the most remarkable young band in Ireland having emerged, quite literally, from out of nowhere. Theirs is of course a well-worn and hoary old story, albeit one pock-marked with crudely-formed testimonials and urban myths. This is something I’ll return to... Continue Reading →

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