Dave Fanning

The 1980s in Irish music tend to be eulogised retrospectively as chiefly about U2 and Sinéad O’Connor. Dublin venues were reportedly thronged with hor(...)

Pat Critchley forgets nothing. He has the natural born teacher’s gift for absorbing names and faces and remembering the best of their lessons. Some of(...)

Larry Gogan Born: May 3rd, 1934 Died: January 7th, 2020 Larry Gogan, who has died in Dublin aged 85, was for nearly six decades the voice of pop radi(...)

The Magnet Bar. Pearse Street. Late 1980. The Atrix play. Swirls of image and lyrics, vectors of vivid and deft poetics layered across the kaleidoscop(...)

 “The music echoes in the emptiness. It reminds us where we came from and where we’re bound.” David Mutti Clark was referring to the blues in his(...)

“I came from England in 1978 as I thought there was a great opportunity in Dublin for punk to flourish, but instead I was confronted with a narrow-min(...)

It’s a tribute to the enduring enthusiasm and professionalism of Larry Gogan that news of the veteran RTÉ star’s retirement from 2FM after close to si(...)

By any yardstick a 61-date world tour is going to be gruelling, not least on the back of a 51-show tour only a year earlier. But the home stretch is w(...)

In 1993, Albert Reynolds was elected taoiseach, the beef tribunal finally ended after a gruelling 226 days, Niamh Kavanagh won yet another Eurovision,(...)

I miss mixtapes sometimes. I devoted years of my life to making them for myself and for girls who, I imagined, would surely fall in love with me after(...)