Charlie Hanlon is laughing in the corner of a quiet cafe in Belfast. In a few days time the singer-songwriter from Downpatrick will celebrate his seventeenth birthday, a milestone for more reasons than one.
“It’s going to be two years since I wrote ‘I Lost Myself’. I remember so clearly writing that song on my fifteenth birthday. I didn’t want to have a party, I just wanted to sit with my guitar and record. I stuck a demo of the track on Soundcloud and the next day ATL Introducing played it, I couldn’t believe it. I remember asking myself ‘how have I blagged this one?’. It was such a feeling, that was the start for me.”
Wynona Bleach led me to learn of saudade – an untranslatable Portuguese term designed to capture a simultaneously melancholy and euphoric nostalgia. According to one particular Portuguese writer it is – “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”
In 1992 Brian Eno delivered a lecture called Perfume, Defence and David Bowie’s Wedding. The last part of the talk was about his David and Iman declaring their love, in Florence. This moment also fetched an exclusive media deal for Hello magazine. Eno presented the celebrity manoeuvres of the day in a diagram form. He saw it as a ritualised, kabuki theatre – public and yet strangely private. It was transactional, but little was delivered.
“I wanna make loads of money,” howls Rory Nellis with a handful of gravel, a hint of age, “to justify all this time.”
This is the season of the Vigilante Cannibal Nun. Her name is Maggie Murtagh and she’s made an online visitation from the Irish famine, feasting on the raw innards of clergy, nobility and English soldiers. She wears hip-hop bling and commits heretical acts. She channels trauma and terror and often, she’s as funny as all get-out.
In her novels to date, the Belfast writer Jan Carson has always explored overarching themes of trauma and guilt in inventive and witty ways, often through the voices of children. In her debut novel Malcolm Orange Disappears, her 11-year-old protagonist begins to literally vanish because of the stress of his difficult family life. In her critically acclaimed second novel The Fire Starters, which won the EU Prize for Literature, two very different fathers in Belfast wrestle with concerns for their children against a backdrop of fire and the threat of violence.
In my time as Online Writer-In-Residence for the Irish Writers Centre I attended an open mic poetry night in Dublin. Slots for reading filled up well before the night itself and the room was packed. Queer poets read alongside straight and cisgender poets and I found myself alarmingly surprised at the ease of it, wondering why I had never, not once, as a straight cisgender person, been to a mainstream poetry evening in the North which featured poetry about queer lives, queer love, queer sex.
Brian Smyth is a Green Party Councillor for the Lisnasharragh area in Belfast. In a previous existence, he fronted the band Dirty Stevie, releasing an album, A Beginner’s Guide To Levitation, in 2010. With this in mind, Dig With It put in a request for playlist and Brian obliged with his personal soundtrack.
‘Holy Show’ is the first affirmative moment of the night and it’s the best. Pillow Queens putting a voice to difficult times, watching the replays and then walking out of the ruins.
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