There’s a strong local showing this weekend in Belfast as Tw!tch gear up for their birthday bash.
Tw!tch celebrate turning ten by inviting a selection of DJs from the island that have played at their parties previously. If you can’t make it, check out the event page for the big international line-up next month. In Dublin, Barry Redsetta is taking a short break after the Out To Lunch weekender from throwing the parties and getting back behind the decks, on Friday he plays with Melly.
Oisin McKenna takes a look at queer activism today and republican activism in the past in his new show Gays Against the Free State. Beggars sat down with him to find out what’s what. Okay so, you’ve done a show at Fringe before – GRINDR – a love story, and you’ve done Write/Performer/Salesman, both back in 2013. Is this your first show since then? Yeah this is my first show … Read More
I think my work is politically charged at times. I am quite ambivalent to the conventional roles ascribed by society to gender. In particular, in our own constitution, the language that enshrines women for example to situations of compromise, for example article 41.2 which prioritises a woman’s domestic role over her career and 40.3.3 which ensures women are not given full their reproductive choices.
Pyg continue with their great bookings in Dublin, and up north it’s a big weekend.
With the bank holiday up north this weekend there’s a good selection of big bookings. Blawan plays Belfast, Prosumer plays The Bunatee with Tw!tch and Shine have Marcel Dettman on Sunday too. Over in Derry, Cocoon have Josh Wink, Sven Vath, Dana Ruh and more at their party.
Nolan spent many months in Drogheda interviewing people who were involved in the punk community and gathering their stories of dissent including Paddy Dillon who disrupted Sunday mass in the early eighties by letting loose a clutch of hens.
This secret history is documented in the publication ‘Subvert All Power’ Drogheda’s Punk History, in the theatre space of the Droichead Arts Cent which will be launched on Saturday the 27th of August. To coincide with the launch there will be talks of feminist punk culture, 24 hour punk gigs and other goings on.
On Sunday 28th there will be a Parade of Dissent including banners, madzers and music through Drogheda and a punk picnic and a free punk concert.
The telly only had two channels when Eoin O’Mahony left Cork for the Big Smoke. He tells rabble how he tried to hide the whack of Benjy with Gauloises and angsty French fillums in the soon to be demolished Screen Cinema. I had a real fondness for the Screen. When I was rent from the Real Capital of Ireland to Dublin in the late 1980s, the 84 from my far … Read More
When was Pallas formed?
Pallas was formed in 1996 when myself and Brian Duggan located a building on Foley Street. It was an old knitwear factory called Pallas Knitwear so after a bit of pre-ambling about a few different names we decided on Pallas because Pallas was the goddess of the muses, the goddess of intellect and the goddess of war. We knew we were going to be in for a rough ride so we wanted her on our side.
Guerilla Studios stakes a claim to be the studio for underground bands in Dublin. Bit Thompson caught up with John ‘Spud’ Murphy and asked why they set up a recording studio when the arse has fallen out of the industry. Well, how’s it going? So tell me how youse got started in the recording business? Well it started when I was in a band called Ilya K and we’d … Read More
It’s August and that means that the Premiership is back on. Disgusted with the ever increasing commodification of his first love, Niall McCabe gives the top-tier of English football a brutal and honest take-down. League of Ireland anyone? As the Giddy long days of summer turn inexorably shorter and the squirrels get ready for the nut bonanza that heralds a long and dark Winter, one beast trundles Balor like into view. This … Read More
Open any encyclopaedia on Ireland and invariably you will find two of Dublin’s finest wordweavers, Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan, either on the same page or opposite pages eyeballing one another. Alan O’Brien takes a look at two Dubliners whose backgrounds couldn’t contrast any more entirely.
Beckett spent his childhood in the sleepy-affluent and sheltered area of Foxrock. Behan, had his formative years in the overcrowded Dublin metropolis of the 1920s and hungry 30s. Beckett’s education was of the highest standard a well-to-do Protestant family could expect; attending Miss Elsners Academy, the Royal Portora, Enniskillen and Trinners. While Behan’s education was of the highest standard a working-class family with Irish-republican politics (that was as much of a staple diet as tea, bread and margarine) could expect; attending William Street Convent, St. Canices Christian Brothers, Bolton Street Tech and Jail.