Latest news with #DavidKeenan
Extra.ie
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
David Keenan announces Dublin and London shows: 'This is the start of a new chapter'
He will play the Ambassador Theatre on July 12. David Keenan has announced a series of gigs for next July, including a show in London's Bush Hall on July 10 and Dublin's Ambassador Theatre on July 12. Announcing the dates on Instagram, the Dundalk-born artist teased that this is the start of a new chapter, and that there were more announcements to come this week. Most recently, Keenan was announced as the composer for upcoming crime drama Salvable, starring Shia LaBeouf and Toby Kebbell. View this post on Instagram A post shared by David Keenan (@davidkeenanmuso) Keenan launched his debut album, A Beginner's Guide to Bravery, in 2020, which reached number one on the Irish Independent Albums charts. News of his fourth album, the follow-up to 2022's Crude, is expected later this year. Earlier this year, the musician also premiered Focla ar Chanbhs, a documentary which follows him through the creative process across 500 days. It made appearances at Craicfest (NYC), LA Irish Film Festival & Solas Nua (DC), while its European premiere will take place at Krakow Film Festival this month Tickets for David Keenans London and Dublin dates go on sale this Friday, May 23, here.
Spectator
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
My adventures in experimental music
David Keenan acquired his craft as a music writer, he says, from reading the crème de la crème of critics who milked rock music for all it was worth during the 1970s – Lester Bangs, Griel Marcus, Paul Morley, Biba Kopf – before deciding that rock criticism was not his bag. In the preface to this weighty collection of his music journalism, he says he considered himself more of a 'rock evangelist'. The pieces originally appeared between 1998, when Keenan was writing for hardcore music magazines such as Melody Maker, MOJO and the Wire, and 2015, after which he checked out of regular reviewing duties to pursue his career as a novelist. Luckily for him, his debut novel This Is Memorial Device proved a smash hit. He dedicates Volcanic Tongue to ur-rocker Lou Reed, but the point is pressed that stylistic labels barely compute to Keenan, and there are lengthy and insightful pieces about free jazz, folk and modern composition too. Concerned not so much with the technical nuts and bolts driving music forwards, or re-examining existing mythomanias, Keenan is instead motivated to capture 'the first rush of hearing' and the attitudes behind – even forming – the sounds. Rock, he says, tends towards collapsing into nostalgia. But tracing what he terms the rock and roll 'urge' elsewhere has taken him far beyond rock – towards other music unafraid to work itself out in the moment of playing. Keenan's interview with the free-improviser guitarist Derek Bailey, when it was published in the Wire in 2004, made me grasp the extent to which Bailey's inquisitive, nigglingly provocative music was an extension of his acerbic wit.
