Joel Harkin is the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival 2024 Artist-in-Residence. The Donegal-born singer-songwriter receives the torch from previous powerhouse artists-in-residence  such as Winnie Ama and Joshua Burnside.

I meet Joel Harkin for a chat in East Belfast not far from his studio, Aye Sound Mastering, where he mixes and masters records for fellow artists in the Belfast scene. He’s been releasing music since 2018, including the NI Music Prize shortlisted LP Never Happy (2020) and his most recent EP, Sham Supermarket (2023). Continue Reading…

For Esmeralda Road, 2024 has brought a new lease of life to the band. They just never thought that a rebirth would happen so early in their career.

Under the name Moonboot, they had garnered a following that helped them to take Single Of The Year at 2023’s NI Music Prize for their debut track, and first song they had ever written together, ‘To U’. Yet within a matter of days, the band’s social media accounts were taken down due to complications with a footwear company of the same name. Eager to let people know they hadn’t disappeared after this success, the band knew they needed to rebrand. After throwing around ideas they finally landed on Esmeralda Road, named after the street where they had lived in London.  Continue Reading…

Before she was a music journalist, Carol Clerk was a teenage music fanatic in Belfast, navigating the local scene, or what was left of it, as the Troubles intensified in the early 1970s. Carol wrote her first article for Melody Maker, published May 23, 1973, when she was just 18. Ultimately, she became News Editor of the music paper in London.

In ‘Bombs, Boredom and No Bands’ she chronicled a week in her life in a music scene too barren to contemplate: a teenage Carol and her friends sorely reminisce on the days when bands actually came to Belfast, bands who at the time the article was written became deterred by increasingly frequent, indiscriminate bombings in a dirty conflict. Between exhausting day trips to Dublin where bands did play and the odd sub-par, overpriced disco, the kids rarely got a chance to go to a gig to escape what the world was coming to around them.
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Below is an image of protesters with dustbin lids, taken at a pro-Palestinian rally on Donegall Place Belfast, 30 March 2024.

The dustbin lid has been an instrument of resistance in Ireland since the conflict with the Black and Tan forces in 1920.

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Artwork: Frances Smyth

The new record by Huartan is called ‘Fiáin’. It is a protest tune that revisits ‘The Foggy Dew’ and the revolutionary sentiments of Easter 1916. Now, it has electronic beats and a cut-up speech from activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, addressing the National Demonstration for Palestine in Dublin, January 13.

Her words are piercing and direct. She is outraged at the actions of the Israel Defence Force in Gaza. She calls it genocide and she laments the many breaches of the United Nations Charter. Also, she is furious at the Irish parties – Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – for not contesting the actions in the way that the South African government has done. Further, Bernadette condemns Sinn Féin, “a government in waiting” and wants their leader, Mary Lou McDonald, to “step up to the plate, now.” Palestine, she says, is a litmus test for our conscience.   Continue Reading…

Steve Pyke takes astounding photos of faces and hands, landscapes and astronauts. He has pictured war veterans, roadside shrines, monumental thinkers and the countenance of Shane MacGowan.

An artist and an agent of mischief, he takes most of his portraits on a Rolleiflex TLR that was engineered in 1957 and still delivers detail, skin tones and fine poetry on silver halide. For many sittings, he spends a lot of the scheduled time talking with his subjects, finding a sympathetic rhythm. Then he gets in tight with close-up lenses and aims for the moment of transference when his sitters reveal a piece of their soul. Continue Reading…

Ram, bam, thank you man. Huartan play Irish trad music with rave dynamics, masks and pagan intent. They attach meaning to pre-Christian spirits, especially the hawthorn tree, a species you don’t want to mess with. Just to make the point clear, there are two dancers on stage, representing the fairy folk – alternately good and evil, light and dark. They are denizens of the hawthorn manor and they have assembled at the Black Box to enact síogaí magic. Continue Reading…

GUB is a parcel of poems, alive with Belfast vernacular and spitball zen. It sees heaven in a gravy chip. It is wise to Captain Beefheart, Snap! and Roxy Music. The guy in the ice cream van serves up Embassy Regal on the sly until he is shopped by a tout. But hey, he was once a boss feature of the Lower Shankill and he made a classy entrance:  Continue Reading…

Elaine Howley first came to my attention (writes Timmy Stewart) via the heartbreakingly good The Distance Between Heart and Mouth on the always on point Irish imprint, Touch Sensitive. It’s a beautifully emotive collection of work that shifts between ethereal folk, hazy psyche and otherworldly electronics. An album I return to time and time again and know it’s got a classic yet unique sound that will have me coming back forever. I managed to catch Elaine’s live show at the Courthouse in Bangor last Summer and exactly like the album, it’s impressive how she builds layers of such rich warm audio tapestry while flying solo. What makes the album so incredible, also truly carries over to the live experience.
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Fancy the greatest commission? Stuart Bailie took the call in 1987 to meet The Pogues in NYC, preparing for their breakthrough moment, ‘Fairytale of New York’. What follows is a remembrance of that visit, with some pictures from his personal archive plus an extract from the original Record Mirror cover story…

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