I remember being twelve years old and helping out in my family’s bakery. My Dad’s friend Tim called with news that he had been at a recording of Noel Hill & Tony MacMahon in Knocknagree. In the middle of the conversation he handed me a tape of U2′s “War”. I had asked him for it...

You can’t grow up in Dublin in the eighties without feeling that you somehow played a part in the grand dramatical of U2, from battle of the bands to mega superstars. In the pre-tiger, pre-hair straightener ramshackles of a seemingly devout but downtrodden Catholic Ireland, U2 gave the nation a well needed shot of international...

Leonard Cohen is probably my favourite artist. If someone unfamiliar with his music asks me what is his best song I tell them ‘So Long Marianne’. However, if a fan asks me what is my favourite song, my answer is ‘Tonight will be Fine’.  I find myself in a similar dilemma with trying to pick...

Inflammable Material is certainly not the greatest Irish rock album of all time, but it is a big personal favourite.  I’m a big fan of everything from Van Morrison to The Pogues, but Stiff Little Fingers were a special band to me for many reasons when I was a teenager in the 80s. Like many...

So, the chaps from Noise get onto me about doing this favourite-Irish-album-of-all-time thing. Picking a favourite record, regardless of nationality, is akin to deciding which of your legs you would rather keep. It’s a pretty tricky situation; worse still, some acts have the knack of making more than just one cracking LP. Bastards. Thankfully, nobody...

I thought this task would be an easy one . . . but no, not at all! I was thinking that perhaps I’d propose Rum Sodomy and The Lash by the Pogues, or Scullion’s eponymous album as my favourite Irish record ever. Maybe even Fionn Regan’s End Of History? But there are many things to...

‘For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. They will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. You will tread upon the lion and the cobra, you will trample the great lion and the serpent’ Being a fan...

Thoughts of Van as a near cousin to Paul Brady or something worse permeated my mind as I listened to 2FM playing ‘Bright Side of Road’ endlessly on its rota in the cold-bathroom-Pope-worshipping winter of 1979. Then one night, while stuck with my family in a dreary Galway two-storey, semi-detached house for a week in the...

I was doing a few shows in the States when I first heard For The Birds – based in Boston and playing gigs in North Hampton, Pittsburgh and New York. It meant a lot of trips on the Greyhound, one or two internal flights, traveling in the wrong direction on the subway and a whole...

You’re not going to come across this forgotten gem in many record collections. In fact, I’d forgotten that I even had it until I relocated my vinyl collection from my parents’ house. It had sat there, cruelly ignored for as many years as it took me to realise what a waste of time collecting  CDs...