Culture
/
On The Record

Jim Carroll

Music, Life and everything else

Society

Girls_Names The age of niche

Why the most exciting and innovative music and art can be found in the magins – and why the mainstream is content to ignore it

When bands – and fans – bite back

It’s not just Chris Brown who has had a trying week on Twitter. The contretemps between Garbage singer Shirley Manson and a bunch of fans, including blogger Vanessa Monaghan and singer-songwrter Conor Furlong, has been well documented online already. Monaghan …

What Richard Did: sense and sensibility

A few months ago, What Richard Did director Lenny Abrahamson was one of the guests at a Banter session at the Earagail Arts Festival which looked at how Irish culture has dealt with the move from boom to bust in …

Moving to a post-comments world

It’s a bad time to be a troll. Most of you will have noticed by now that there’s something of a backlash going on at present against anonymous comments, cyber-bullying and general nasty online pondlife. It didn’t quite begin with …

A is for Arthur, advertising and alcohol

It’s a blackout. This is what happens when you are a major drinks brand with a very large advertising and sponsorship budget and you want to brand a day as your own. Historically, days were named after saints, but this …

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 …

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, …