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On The Record

Jim Carroll

Music, Life and everything else

Ireland

It’s good to talk

It seems that we’re in the middle of a talking boom. Over the last couple of years, talking shops of one stripe or another have popped up around the country as people seek out venues to chew the fat, argue …

All quiet on the Marlay Park front

You could hear the sigh of relief from SoCoDu all over the city on Saturday night. In the end, the world did not come to an end with mad-out-of-it David Guetta and Tom Jones’ fans rampaging through the suburbs. In …

It wouldn’t be the Olympics without a row

It was inevitable, wasn’t it? The row, the spat, the dispute, the acrimony, the fuming, the huffing, the puffing, the high moral ground, the indignation, the crossed wires, the point-scoring. When it comes to the Olympics, we don’t just produce …

Time to stop talking about the Phoenix Park and do something instead

It was a classic Irish summer news story. Last weekend’s trio of shows in the Phoenix Park created headlines which had nothing to do with the fluff and froth which usually accompanies mainstream media music coverage. When the news desk …

Questions from the Phoenix Park

The story rumbles on. As any long-term observer of the Irish live music industry could have predicted with ease at the weekend, the usual suspects have joined the fray and jumped on the bandwagon. We’ve also already had the hasty, …

Irish TV’s take on homegrown hip-hop

To judge by the domestic TV schedules, Irish hip-hop is having a bit of a moment. A few weeks ago, the first edition of RTE’s new arts show The Works featured a short report on some of those involved in …

A pointyheaded post about Irish bands and Irish radio

We must be due a bout of fuming really soon about Irish bands and radio play. There’s a grand stretch in the evenings – yes, there really is – so that must mean that we’ll soon get an assortment of …

We all protested

After the parties come the protests. In the last 12 months, you were no-one if you didn’t get out there, do some fuming, shake your fist and say that you were as mad as hell and were not going to …