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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Swell Season in Dublin review: Not a dry eye on the balcony for Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová
The Swell Season – Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová National Concert Hall, Dublin ★★★★☆ Many European tours by international bands conclude with at least one show in Dublin . When the gig is more a homecoming than a visit, there is always more reason to celebrate the end of living out of a suitcase. Saturday's show was more than just another performance for Dubliner Glen Hansard and his one-time partner, Markéta Irglová . It was a means by which to remember old times and reclaim lost ground, a time to dedicate songs to friends ( Damien Dempsey , John Carney ), family (Hansard's young son, Christy), and other musicians ( Billie Eilish , Van Morrison ). It was also, perhaps, recognition of relationships started in flurries of optimism and finished in squalls of despair. This is best exemplified by the delicate ballad People We Used to Be, one of several tracks from the Swell Season's forthcoming album, Forward, receiving its first live airing in Ireland. Irglová, who sits at her piano throughout, takes the lead vocal on a wise, semi-autobiographical song that outlines how, over time, the heart's heavy bruising can disappear. 'Things were easier once, when our hearts were light, we'd stay up talking late and put all the world to right,' she sings. 'How I miss the people we used to be and all those things that you brought out in me.' Was there a dry eye in the house? Not on the balcony, there wasn't. It was surely written in the stars that the pair would reunite for another outing. Hansard is a relentless seeker of collaborations, always on the mooch for a session or a singsong with like-minded musicians, and always true to his humane intentions. Irglová (the youngest ever recipient of an Academy Award in a non-acting capacity for her co-written Best Original Song, Falling Slowly, from 2007's lo-fi indie movie, Once) is on a hiatus from her solo career. Of the two, Hansard is by far the most successful, but based on Saturday's show, we should never underestimate Irglová's abilities to occasionally put a halt to her friend's unbridled gallop. READ MORE There are marked differences between the older and newer songs. Those from the Once years, notably When Your Mind's Made Up and the still untainted Falling Slowly, embody young love in all its naivety, insecurity, and commitment. The songs from Forward represent tension, doubt, and a world in disarray. [ Glen Hansard on fatherhood at 52: 'I can't believe I didn't do it before now' Opens in new window ] Factory Street Bells talks of leaving loved ones behind, the Nick Cave/Bob Dylan hybrid A Great Weight Has Lifted obliquely references Gaza, while Irglová's sublime I Leave Everything To You could be a lost tune from the Wicked soundtrack. The pacing throughout the 140-minute set is deftly handled, from tender ballads to string-breaking guitar shredders, with covers (Van Morrison's Into the Mystic and Gloria, Fergus O'Farrell's Gold, a snippet of Leonard Cohen's Bird On a Wire) as well as spoken word (Stephen James Smith performing his potent new poem, Talk to Me). The show ends, unsurprisingly, with a bunch of flowers for Irglová and a collective thumbs-up for Hansard.
Buzz Feed
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Songs By Lyric Trivia Quiz
A few weeks ago, I made a general knowledge color quiz. The bonus question was asking players to name a song with a color in the title. A grand total of 256 commenters pitched in song titles, and I kind of liked reading them so much, I turned them into the quiz below. Here's how it works: Click the color in the title of the song that the lyrics are from. For example, if the lyrics were "And whatever happened, To Tuesday and so slow," you would click on BROWN because those are lyrics to "BROWN Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison. Ready?
RTÉ News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Renowned poet Paul Durcan dies at 80
Paul Durcan, one of Ireland's most renowned contemporary poets, has died at the age of 80. Born in Dublin in 1944, he began his work 60 years ago with his first book 'Endsville', which was followed by more than 20 others. His work is also known to younger audiences, having featured on the Leaving Cert English syllabus. A winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, his publications include A Snail in My Prime, Crazy About Women, Greetings to our Friends in Brazil, and Cries of an Irish Caveman. He also appeared on Van Morrison's 1990 album Enlightenment. The National Library of Ireland acquired his archive late last year, covering the period from the 1960s to the present day, and including hundreds of the his notebooks, letters and cards. It was described as a collection of exceptional importance by the National Library of Ireland Director Dr Audrey Whitty. It showed Mr Durcan as a prolific letter-writer, and included correspondence with fellow writers, including Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and John McGahern, the library said. Speaking at the archive event last November, his friend, archivist Catriona Crowe, said: "The great thing about him was he kept notebooks all the time. "If ever you were out having dinner with him, he'd have a notebook, and he might take it out and write down a line that struck him, or something came into his head. "So they're all there, and they're kind of an invaluable resource for students of poetry. "The thing about Paul that singles him out, I suppose, is that you spend your time laughing when you're reading his books, because he has such a surreal imagination. I mean, imagine writing a poem called 'Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin'. "He is a really interesting publicly engaged, poet, who loved giving readings, who responded very well to his audiences and who wrote very, very serious poetry that had a surreal and hilarious twist to it so he was constantly surprising." Paul Durcan will be missed by Nessa, his daughters Sarah and Síabhra, his son Michael, his sons-in-law, daughter-in-law, and his nine grandchildren. Funeral arrangements will be announced later.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ireland's hip-hop rebels: How three Belfast bros became Fox News villains
It's almost surprising that a hip-hop band from the perennially troubled, still-British province of Northern Ireland hasn't emerged until now: It's the right kind of place. Admittedly, 'race,' in the 21st-century meaning of the word, is not a major consideration on the island of Ireland, despite some discomfort with recent immigration from Eastern Europe, Syria, North Africa and elsewhere. Belfast and Dublin still don't possess the kind of high-friction cultural ferment found in London, Paris or Berlin, and Ireland's best-known musical exports can clearly be classified along the spectrum that includes rock, pop, folk and punk: Van Morrison, U2, Sinéad O'Connor, the Pogues. Indeed, if there's a track that defines pop music in Northern Ireland before the rise of the Irish-language hip-hop trio Kneecap — now the focus of international controversy and incoherent Fox News attacks after their Coachella performance on April 18 — it would be the exquisite punk-pop single 'Teenage Kicks' by the Undertones, released in 1978 during the worst years of the vicious low-intensity civil conflict known as the Troubles. There's an instructive parallel at work here that strikes me as distinctively Irish. A punk band from Derry — a city where violent riots occurred nearly every night, and whose residents couldn't even agree on its name (to Protestants and the British government, it was and is Londonderry) — crafted a completely out-of-context pop record that carried the influence of the Ramones and the Beach Boys but zero hint of social conflict or cultural trauma. That could be construed as willful escapism or youthful irresponsibility; it strikes me as more like storytelling, an area where the Irish are known to excel. Kneecap might appear, at first, to be the exact opposite: A hip-hop trio from predominantly Catholic communities in Belfast and Derry, all born during the latter stages of the Troubles (which gradually petered out between 1998 and 2004), the band embraced a highly performative brand of radical politics from the get-go: anti-British, sure, but also anti-cop, anti-Israel, anti-old-school Irish nationalism and anti-authority figure, just for starters. All of which is abundantly captured in their highly entertaining mock-biopic (available on Netflix), which was Oscar-shortlisted in 2024 and built a global audience for Kneecap well before their recent tours of the U.S., U.K. and Australia. You don't need to claim that Kneecap's politics are insincere to understand that they constitute just one element of a brand that includes highly conventional hip-hop braggadocio about sex, drug use and other forms of extralegal activity, along with what made the band stand out in the first place: a Google Translate-defeating mixture of imported rap argot, Belfast Hiberno-English and the Irish language. The title of their 2018 debut album, "3CAG," requires a decoder ring: That stands for "trí chonsan agus guta" or "three consonants and a vowel," a reference to the street drug MDMA, whose consumption Kneecap's members have frequently celebrated. One of their biggest hits in Ireland, "Get Your Brits Out," combines IRA-style political slogans with a refrain meant to encourage young women in the audience to, um ... I think you get it. I could devote this whole article to unpacking the tangled politics around the Irish language, but you wouldn't read it, so this will have to do: Since virtually no one in Ireland, north or south, now exclusively speaks Irish as a daily language, fluency has become a distinctive cultural and political signifier. For decades, the language revival was associated with obligatory schoolbook lessons, traditional folk culture and an increasingly dreary version of nationalism; Kneecap's rise can be understood as the leading edge of a general pop-culture trend: Speaking Irish is cool again. In the uneasy and remarkably small-minded politics of Northern Ireland — which remains about evenly divided between Catholics who identify as Irish and Protestants who identify as British — the Irish language is still perceived as a political provocation. That's exactly why Kneecap's two principal rappers, who go by the in-joke names Mo Chara and Móglai Bap, grew up in Irish-speaking families. But it was the band's more overt political discourse that has gotten them in trouble — if you actually believe that making headlines around the world amounts to trouble for a deliberately confrontational rap act. Toward the end of Kneecap's second Coachella performance last month, which by all accounts was packed and enthusiastically received, the band projected a series of three slides on a screen above the stage. Here's the BBC report: The first message said: "Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people," followed by: "It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes," and a final screen added: "[Expletive] Israel. Free Palestine." Lead rapper Mo Chara (a conventional greeting that literally means 'my friend'), then told the crowd, "The Irish not so long ago were persecuted at the hands of the Brits, but we were never bombed from the f**king skies with nowhere to go. The Palestinians have nowhere to go." That might not be the most historically nuanced or deeply considered comparison of the two conflicts, but I can't say I detect any lies. Kneecap were already known villains to the right-wing British media and politicians like embattled Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, so you might have expected the MAGA-fied American right to be ready. You would be wrong: The ensuing storm of manufactured outrage was comically inept, with Sharon Osbourne, for some reason, stepping forward as the alleged voice of pop-culture responsibility (or something?) to urge that Kneecap's U.S. visas be revoked. That was followed by a bewildering Fox News segment about the Coachella 'F**k Israel' incident, in which former NCAA swimmer turned right-wing influencer Riley Gaines, while admitting she'd never heard of the band, appeared to conflate three Irish rappers with 'rogue activist judges' and concluded, 'No, this didn't happen in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This was in 2025 in America. Beyond, beyond staggering.' I doubt many people would find it 'beyond staggering' for a hip-hop band from an odd, hyperlocal background that wants to attract a global left-leaning youth-culture audience to say bad things about Israel. You could argue, in fact, that it's a bit lazy and not especially well thought-out, or that the members of Kneecap are cashing in on what has been called Irish privilege, where you get to be regular white people in some contexts (such as American society in general) and part of the world's oppressed classes in others. That privilege is no doubt why Kneecap's members were admitted to the U.S. in the first place; if anyone at Kristi Noem's DHS had bothered to check out their backgrounds, they might be in ICE detention right double standard is no doubt at work here, but so is the double standard among Kneecap's critics on both sides of the Atlantic, dutifully playing their roles as finger-wagging scolds lamenting the moral collapse of Today's Youth. Of course it's offensive that Kneecap members apparently chanted 'Up Hamas, up Hezbollah' at a concert last November, or that they suggested a year earlier that right-wing members of the British Parliament deserved to die. It's supposed to be offensive. This band was equally shaped by 'F**k tha Police'-era gangsta rap and early Beastie Boys; they named themselves for the IRA's notoriously gruesome punishment tactic: a shotgun blast to the back of the knee. (As for their chant of 'Maggie's in a box' in tribute to Margaret Thatcher, a political leader none of them is old enough to remember — I'm sorry, that's hilarious.) If it's impossible to tell where the radical politics end and the bad-boy shtick begins with Kneecap, I would say that's pretty much the point, and gently insist that's not exactly a new phenomenon in pop culture, or in culture, period. Elvis Presley once described 'Hound Dog' as a protest song, which leads one to conclude he wasn't half as dumb as he sometimes appeared. To circle all the way back to the Undertones and 'Teenage Kicks,' if that miraculous pop anthem was a fantasy narrative constructed to escape from the grim reality of Northern Ireland in the late '70s, what Kneecap are doing is categorically similar. Yeah, the context has shifted immensely, so much so that Kneecap can use the iconography and sloganeering of the Irish Troubles as ironic or melodramatic background effects. (That would have literally gotten you kneecapped in the '70s.) But the essential Irish paradox is unchanged: We remain true to this claustrophobic little place, and also we want out.
Forbes
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Van Morrison Earns His First New Hit ‘Single' In More Than Half A Decade
Van Morrison returns to the U.K. charts with "Be Just and Fear Not," a trio of tracks packaged as a ... More single that debuts at No. 47 on the Official Physical Singles list. MARLOW, ENGLAND - MAY 16: Van Morrison performs at Pub In The Park 2024 at Higginson Park on May 16, 2024 in Marlow, England. (Photo by) Van Morrison lands another win in the United Kingdom this week. It's impressive that someone who has been working as long as he has can still score smashes, even if minor ones, as most artists see their ability to sell new work dwindle after only a few years. The legendary singer-songwriter, who hails from Belfast in Northern Ireland, is back on the charts in the U.K. thanks to a short, focused release that fans quickly embraced. Despite its brevity, 'Be Just and Fear Not' has become a bestseller, though it's classification is a bit strange. Morrison appears on the Official Physical Singles chart, a ranking that tracks the bestselling songs in the U.K. available on physical formats like CD, cassette, and vinyl. His latest release, 'Be Just and Fear Not,' starts off at No. 47, landing near the middle of the tally. 'Be Just and Fear Not' isn't just one tune, even though it appears on the Official Physical Singles chart. It's actually a trio of tracks packaged together into a compact release. Because the collection is so short, the Official Charts Company classifies it as a single rather than an EP — a technicality that matters only because it determines where a project ends up charting. The three tracks featured on the effort were originally intended for Morrison's Live at Orangefield album, which dropped last summer. However, according to a Record Store Day announcement tied to this new release, Morrison ultimately felt that the compositions worked better on their own, and together. By debuting at No. 47, 'Be Just and Fear Not' gives Morrison his twelfth appearance on the Official Physical Singles chart. It's his first new entry on this list in several years, his last being 'Broken Record' back in 2017. That track eventually rose to No. 12 and lingered for four frames. With this latest bestseller, Morrison has now placed on the ranking in three different decades. His first win came back in March 1995, when he teamed up with the group The Chieftains for a reworking of his beloved classic 'Have I Told You Lately That I Love You.' That version only reached No. 71, but it marked the beginning of Morrison's run on this chart.
