@IrishMJ

A burlesque gig one week, a rock n' roll gig the next, it's almost like a return to normal.  Almost, but not quite.  The Moat Theatre has a maximum of 50 people in it tonight, not because of poor ticket sales, but down to COVID 19 restrictions.Anyway, tonight's gig is mainly a local affair.  On the bill are Acoustic Freeway, Pete Kavanagh, Saoirse Casey and finally, Paddy Casey. The gig itself was a fundraiser for the Moat Theatre to help it through these difficult times.I think everyone enjoyed the night, it was a rare chance to see some live music in the town.  Hopefully this will be the start of the return of gigs in Naas.Anyway, check out the photos below:

February 29th 2020, that was the day of the last gig I'd gone to.  It was Jane Willow in the Cobblestone in Dublin.  It was also the last time I'd been in a city! I'd booked a couple of weeks leave in September, so, when I heard that the Peacock Parlour was taking place in Cork whilst I was on leave, I decided that was the place to be!  A night out at a gig, albeit a burlesque one, in Cork. Tickets were bought, hotel was booked and plans were set in motion!On to the night in question.  I arrived at Kino, was met at the door by security where we went through some Covid19 formalities. Once complete, I was shown to my table and staff explained how the table service operated. On to the show...  On the night we were treated to some comedy, pole dancing, spoken word , drag and burlesque by Foxy P. Cox, The Wild Geeze, Miss LaVelle and many others. What more could you ask for??? If the Peacock Parlour pays a visit to your town, or if you are in Cork any time soon, I'd highly rec…

So it started out with picking up the Tape and Vinyl collections from my folks house... They've been sitting there looking at me ever since.  I had to do something, I had to find a way to store these pieces of history.  I also had to find a way of playing those cassettes!I made a plan, I was going to use my spare / junk room as a music room.  Somewhere I could go and listen to music in peace.  My musical equivalent of a Library! A skip was ordered, the junk removed and the project kicked off.As per usual, I got sidetracked with the tech side. I trawled through the online stores for a week trying to find anyone who sold a HiFi with a Tape Deck. Unsurprisingly, no one does.Next on the hit-list was Ebay. I searched for another week, but again, I came up with nothing. Anything I found was going to be coming from the US or Australia, and given the state of the world at the moment, who knew when it would arrive.I tried a local site, adverts.ie, and on the second day, found a Sony CMT-DC…

Back in the day (by that I mean the mid 80s and early 90s), music came on Vinyl and Cassette Tape. Yeah, CDs were just starting to make headway, but CD players were still expensive.  Me, being a poor student, stuck to the humble cassette tape.  They were rugged, cheap, easy to record on and best of all, easy to create your own mixes. You could, if you searched, get C120 tapes, on which you could fit up to 120 minutes of music!
Why do I mention this?  Well, this week I collected my old tape collection from my parents house.  It had been living in their attic, undisturbed, for the last 21 years.  Actually, not only did I pick up the tape collection, I picked up my vinyl collection also! 
There were some absolute gems in the tape collection, Dignam and Goff, Power of Dreams, The 4 of Us, Blink, The Golden Horde, The Dixons, Ghost of an American Airman...  and that was just in one bundle!
Only another 170 something tapes to get through!
As for the vinyl, I haven't really gone through it y…

Bandcamp Friday... If any online music company comes out of the Covid19 Pandemic with honours, it looks like it will be Bandcamp.  Why?  Well, it's quite simple, it's down to Bandcamp Friday. What's Bandcamp Friday? Well, on the first Friday of each month, Bandcamp waives its fees on album and merch sales (on both physical media and downloads), meaning more money goes to the artists. This all kicked off in March as the world ground to a halt and with it, the music business.  OK, the waiving of these fees won't make up for the loss of earnings from not gigging, but y'know, every little bit helps.Today, being the first Friday of the month, I did some shopping.  I picked up a copy of the Sowing Acorns Limited Edition EP by Emma Langford on cassette. Yes, you read that right, on cassette.  Look, don't ask why, just go with it! I also picked up a copy of a copy of The Swedish Railway Orchestra LP by, well, The Swedish Railway Orchestra on vinyl.  Yeah yeah, I know, loo…

I ditched Spotify Premium this weekend. Why?  Well, I read an interview with Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, and I profoundly disagreed with what he said and his attitude towards musicians in the interview.  So I said 'F*ck it', and closed my premium account.  I still do have a free account as many bands choose Spotify to release their music, so I'll keep it for that reason.
What now though?  Well, I'd created a large library of music on my home server over the last 20 years or so.  Every time I bought a CD, it got ripped to the server.  Every time I bought digital music from Bandcamp, Google or 7 Digital, they too got stored on the server, and that was fine for home use, it worked well.  But now I'd dumped Spotify, what could I do, how could I access my music outside the house?
I'd played around with software called Plex a few years back, but had no use for it. I ended up doing nothing with Plex, but for this project, I decided to revisit it.  I knew that if I se…