Alicia Raye’s brand of R&B and pop is up to the brief, with hooks that you’ll have spinning around your head all day. But before this, she was the girl that sounded like Rihanna. “I was on a couple of other artists’ songs doing backing vocals,” she explains. “I remember one of my friends starting this rumour where he took a video of his song and said, ‘Can’t believe I got Rihanna on my track’ and people believed him somehow. And then he said it was really Alicia Raye, and put my handle out there. That’s when people really started paying attention.” Continue Reading…

Tina Turner charted in 1989 with ‘The Best’, a song that had previously been recorded by Bonnie Tyler. The song was then adopted by Johnny Adair and the Shankill UFF. ‘Simply the Best’ was the motto on their shirts when 50 paramilitary members joined the Orange Order protests at Drumcree in 2000. Johnny had a matching shirt for his Alsatian dog, Rebel. Continue Reading…

“More strobe!” Ross shouts, as the anxiety levels rise, the beats collide and the Chalk experience jabs at the retinas and the ear canals. The Black Box is fittingly, as black as it’s ever been. We’ve been removed from the usual LED colours – that vapid wash of cyan, magenta and yellow. The Chalk method is to let it glare and keep it cranked. Continue Reading…

In Song of Myself, the opening poem from his seminal collection Leaves Of Grass, American poet Walt Whitman exclaims, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself… For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The sprawling and expansive work explores humanity and our connection with nature and each other. And on her third album Hinterland, Naomi Hamilton channels this transcendentalist spirit. Continue Reading…

Joe Mulheron, raised in Belfast, performed with The Men of No Property in the 70s, singing about resistance and civil rights. He was inspired by radical folksingers like Woody Guthrie. He worked with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and some of his repertoire found its way into the Christy Moore songbook. He later relocated to Derry and opened up Sandinos in 1997, a music bar and a gathering place where left-wing movements were celebrated and furthered. Continue Reading…

A few minutes before the production of Good Vibrations at the Opera House, a white-haired guy sits down in Row H. He looks at the stage and measures the scene up there. Hey, it’s an old record shop with pegboard on the walls. There are punk badges plus albums by Bowie, The Damned and Patti Smith. The booze bottles are empty and the dingy surrounds are familiar to generations of crate-diggers. Continue Reading…

A film projector in an attic, adjacent to a window, opposite a motorway. Three film students united by sound and vision, by chord and close-up. Jean-Luc Godard and Thurston Moore. They are Chalk, they are based in Belfast and they are here for the foreseeable.

“We can’t quite believe it ourselves”, says Chalk frontman Ross Cullen. “None of us have ever been in a real band before, it’s just something we thought we’d try because we all like similar music. That’s all.” Continue Reading…

In 2018, he was artist-in-residence at the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, working his chops and winning friends. This year, Joshua is the headliner dude in the big marquee. Surprising, eh?

Well, not if you’ve seen him at the Elmwood Hall in 2021 or witnessed the sold-out hallelujah in the Ulster Hall, last December. Sometimes he looks like an endearing shambles, but Joshua’s art doesn’t fail and the curve is ever-excellent. Here then, are ten good things about the show: Continue Reading…

You knew that CS Lewis was from Northern Ireland as soon as you read the description of Narnia as, “always winter, but never Christmas”. In the same way you know this is a Therapy? album from the outset, when that unalloyed Andy Cairns east Antrim gulder delivers opener ‘They Shoot the Terrible Master’ like a smack around the chops. Continue Reading…

The Joe Nawaz one-man show, Five Days, premiered at the Imagine! Festival of Politics and Ideas in March and will be returning to the stage in the autumn. Joe is publicist with Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, and a writer and performer who lives and works in Belfast.  The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival runs from 27 April – 7 May. This is his Playlisted feature for Dig With It, Issue 10. Continue Reading…