Forest Fest 2025: stars align to send feelgood festival fans home happy
All-Ireland football final
on the two flanking the stage shrank to one corner so the fans watching the last 20 minutes huddled closer, rivalling those keen to see the Athy troubadour strut his stuff. It wasn't Donegal's day but Jack Lukeman more than held his own, aided by the Suso Gospel choir.
Otherwise, it was all about the music at
Forest Fest
in the picturesque village of Emo in Co
Laois
, now in its fourth year and as established a part of the festival calendar as Electric Picnic up the road in Stradbally.
Saturday was the biggest day in terms of crowds and star acts, but a magical performance from The Magic Numbers, building from melodic pop to ever more muscular rock, sent those watching home on a high, giving a satisfying sense of the best wine having been saved till last.
Elsewhere, Qween on the main stage and in particular The Complete Stone Roses on the Fleadh stage also delivered blistering, crowd-pleasing sets.
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Nick Lowe had set the bar high early with a solo set that proved once again what a fantastic songwriter he is. 'I was advised to keep things up tempo as it's a festival,' he said, 'but with just an acoustic guitar there has to be light and shade.' Caravaggio would have been jealous of the result.
Franz Ferdinand at Forest Fest. Photograph: Brian Bastick
Franz Ferdinand at Forest Fest. Photograph: Brian Bastick
Tony Hadley is still looking good but the former Spandau Ballet sounds now like a cocktail singer, whereas Billy Bragg's music has matured and his politics are as relevant as ever. 'Sunday night is the perfect festival slot,' he told the crowd. Friday night, they were saving themselves; Saturday night they're too drunk; whereas last night they had lost all inhibitions.
He told a funny story about meeting a woman in Boulder, Colorado before a gig, who asked the name of his band. When he told her, she said, there used to be a singer in the 1980s called Billy Bragg. It's a good yarn, and it captures a truth that festival founder Philip Meagher has capitalised on. Many great acts from the 1980s and 1990s are still around and appeal to a key demographic.
There are some great up-and-coming acts as part of the mix, such as Pillow Queens and The Oars – but the core ingredients are proven, tried and tested.
Travis at Forest Fest. Photograph: Brian Bastick
A thrilling set from Manic Street Preachers on Saturday night was a huge highlight.
Singer James Dean Bradfield led the Welsh band through a string of great songs, kicking off with Motorcycle Emptiness, in front of a capacity crowd. The Manics have had their share of misfortunes, most notably the loss of Richey Edwards, but the set is dedicated to another late colleague and their producer is standing in for their keyboard player who is ill. Perhaps this gives songs such as A Design for Life and You Stole the Sun from My Heart an edge others lack. They close with If You Tolerate This Your Children Will be Next, as three Palestinian flags are waved near the front of the crowd.
'This is the sound of Laois I've been looking forward to hearing,' says Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos, fresh from Glastonbury, as their hit song Do you Want To is met with a roar of approval on a sunny Friday evening.
Kapranos, as limber as a flamenco dancer, delivers a hit-filled set as shining as his black satin bomber jacket: Take Me Out, Hooked, Michael, Walk Away and This Fire were standouts.
Tom Meighan at Forest Fest. Photograph: Brian Bastick
If Franz Ferdinand are top-of the range glossy, The Dandy Warhols, who followed, are prestige matt, with fewer pyrotechnics but a set including hits Bohemian Like You and We Used to Be Friends that slowly builds to deliver a captivating soundscape, complemented by a powerful visual display on the screens behind.
Something Happens had got the ball rolling earlier, Tom Dunne offering some sound advice: 'did you all take your medication before coming out today?' Other Friday highlights included Alabama 3's rendition of Woke up this Morning, the singers dressed like Pearly King and Queen, as a fan shinned her way up and swung from a pole in the Village Stage tent.
A feature of the festival is its plethora of brilliant covers bands. Friday night closed with Live Forever Oasis, Daft Punk Tribute and Thin as Lizzy on three stages, while Walk the Line (Johnny Cash) and Qween closed on other nights. No complaints as they delivered some of the most crowd-pleasing sets. Standouts included Pogueology, The Classic Beatles, Neil Young tribute Harvest and superb Smiths act These Charming Men, who have graduated from the third to second stage and deserve a main stage slot next year. Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.
Peter Hook made a welcome return to the festival, and delivered a solid set, this time focused more on his time with New Order than Joy Division. He too was pleased with the crowd. 'You've made an old man very happy,' he said, responding to the adulation that greeted a strong finish featuring True Faith, Temptation, Blue Monday and Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Sharon Shannon at Forest Fest. Photograph: Brian Bastick
Earlier, Larne rockers had dedicated Die Laughing to the late Ozzy Osbourne. The Stranglers were rather downbeat, apart from Always the Sun, Peaches and the brilliant Golden Brown. It was curious to go from that song of heroin addiction to another delivered by an irrepressible Mary Coughlan, The Ice Cream Man (inspired by an Irish Times story she reads in a Galway pub, she said).
Rather miscast on the Fleadh stage, she packed it out with songs as dark and sparkling as her runners. The Susu choir joined her on stage for a beautiful rendition of I Would Rather Go Blind, which she first heard aged 15 when stepping out with 'future president'
Catherine Connolly
's brother. Her rousing rendition of Ride On is the best I've heard.
The sound quality throughout was exceptional and overall the organisation was impeccable, but the stage timings irritatingly went half an hour awry on Saturday afternoon.
Kula Shaker. Photograph: Brian Bastick
This is a feelgood festival, attracting young and old and sending them home happy. The bands too. Teenage Fanclub singer Raymond McGinley can't help smiling as he delivers a joyous set, with Sparky's Dream and What You Do to Me standouts.
The Riptide Movement, headlining the second stage on Saturday night, caught the mood with the glorious closer All Works Out. 'Tomorrow's a new day.'
Here's to next year.
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Ireland in the 1980s was bloody awful, but there was at least one good reason not to emigrate
The first play I saw was Macbeth at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It filled me with awe, partly because it was probably very good (the darkly compelling Ray McAnally was in the title role) and partly because I had never before experienced the weird wonder of people being transformed right before my eyes. I was 13 then. I'm 67 now. So I've waited well over half a century for a staging of Macbeth that sent the same quakes up the spine – until I saw Druid 's new version in Galway last weekend. With Marty Rea as Macbeth and Marie Mullen as Lady Macbeth, Garry Hynes 's production is by far the best I've seen anywhere. [ Riders to the Sea and Macbeth: A magnificent horror unbalancing nature Opens in new window ] Which incidentally brings home a truth we too often take for granted: for all the nonsense we have to put with in Ireland, we are a nation blessed in its artists. The church betrayed us. Governments sold us out for a handful of dig-outs. Our banks became casinos. Much of the media became cynical and self-serving. But through it all there have been brilliant creative people holding fast to the hard core of art: integrity in action. Druid's Macbeth, coupled in a typically contrary and radiant gesture with John Millington Synge's great one-act tragedy Riders to the Sea, marks the company's 50th anniversary. Anyone else might stage a birthday party with cakes, candles, balloons and novelty costumes – and a nice, punter-friendly comedy to keep the box office jingling. Druid give us a fearless and ferocious exploration of evil. This is the splendour of the company and of its indefatigable leader Hynes – they never saw a grain they wouldn't want to go against. READ MORE Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen in the 1970s Druid was founded in 1975, but really came into its own at the start of the 1980s. This in itself is a triumph of perversity. The early 1980s were bloody awful. The economy imploded. The agony of the H-Block hunger strikes played itself out like a gala season of nightmares. The abortion referendum was another mad parade of a country's tormented obsessions. Statues were moving and the Virgin Mary was appearing in the Munster skies. A young girl died giving birth in a grotto. A teacher was fired for living in sin and a judge said she was lucky not to be living in a Muslim country where she would be stoned to death. I remember going, in a sceptical mood, to see Druid's production of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1982. Why on earth, in the midst of all these public psychodramas, would a young theatre company want to stage the calcified old drama that had become a national joke? And then being astounded and electrified by what they were doing with it. They were reclaiming Irish tradition, revelling both in its wild poetry and its dirty realism. Druid was emerging as a kind of national liberation movement – liberating the inheritance of Irish art from prudishness and shame, but also from soft charm and wheedling winsomeness. They were making no apologies and taking no prisoners. And it struck me then that, although Druid was not overtly political, it was radically engaged. What it was engaged in was (in Martin Amis's phrase) the War on Cliche. In the North, the great poets ( Derek Mahon , Michael Longley , Seamus Heaney , Paul Muldoon ) realised they couldn't stop the horrors, but they could keep alive a supple, inventive, playful kind of language that stood in opposition to the sectarian cliches that underpinned them. Druid were doing the same thing in the South – creating a living counterculture in which all the suffocating platitudes, banalities and truisms were thrown into the bullring of their tiny auditorium to be skewered and gored on the horns of precise and truthful performance. For myself, the existence of that supercharged space up a lane in Galway was one good reason not to emigrate. Druid were gloriously shameless, but they also shamed the rest of us with their relentless commitment to Ireland, their superbly stubborn belief that a basket case could also be a Moses basket, that a collapsing country might also be a place of pure possibility. Like other Irish artists at the time – from U2 to John McGahern , Eavan Boland and Druid's great collaborator Tom Murphy – they just got on with being world class by being themselves. As Jonathan Swift said when he left his money to build a psychiatric hospital, 'No nation needed it so much.' The late playwright Tom Murphy at the Druid Theatre But I've been using the past tense inappropriately. Druid's 50th anniversary is certainly shadowed by loss. The light of some of those luminous actors – Mick Lally , Ray McBride, Maelíosa Stafford – has been dimmed by death. Jerome Hynes, whose managerial brilliance was equally vital to Druid's growth, died scandalously young. The sudden loss last Easter of Garry Hynes's wife Martha O'Neill hovers over the anniversary celebrations as an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder of the ravages of time. [ Garry Hynes: 'My wife was taken from me in the blink of an eye. My whole life's changed' Opens in new window ] And yet, because Hynes is a great artist, pain and grief are transmuted into defiance. Instead of being a lap of honour, this current Druid production is a magnificent raging against the dying of the light. It is not afraid of the dark. It goes so deep into it you think you have reached its limits – and then it goes further and deeper. Truly great theatre is a hair's breadth from truly terrible theatre. Rea's Macbeth risks monstrosity. Hynes allows him to conjure a vision that would have seemed excessive even a decade ago: pure evil. He makes that vision both timeless and terribly of our time, redolent of Vladimir Putin , Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump without being reduced to any of them. And it is, in a broad sense, that most countercultural thing in contemporary Ireland: profoundly religious – Macbeth as the Antichrist. This is the glory of Druid: 50 years is overture. Hynes is more restless, more edgy, more disconcerting and more masterly than she was when the company started. Druid is not taking a bow. It is still headbutting all our complacencies. We come out of the theatre seeing stars.
