@irishmj

Originally published 21/10/2013 on Chunk.ie Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats. That’s a name you won't forget in a hurry. What's the story behind it, presuming there is a story... Its about a psycho killer who thinks he's God and then goes out into the desert to start his own death cult. I've been listening to Mind Control for the last few weeks and I've been trying to classify your sound, but failing miserably. It seems to flit between many different genres. Having said I have noticed that the album does go well with Queen of the Stone Ages latest opus, Like Clockwork. How would you guys classify yourselves? Its hard to say. There's elements of rock, metal, pop, psych.... Cambridge is noted for many things, education, boat races, and most recently, Silicon Fen. It's not exactly known worldwide for producing hard rocking bands. What happened with you guys? Are you all Cambridge locals or did you meet there at college? No, none of us are from Cam

Originally published 16/10/2013 on Chunk.ie It’s a over a month since the Electric Picnic and we’ve all had time to look back and reflect on what we saw and did over that amazing weekend. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but some of it was just great. This Side Up, hip hop merchants from Sligo, fall in to the latter. I must admit, I was a bit wary when I was told that these rappers from Sligo were a “must see” act for the weekend. Irish Rap, well… Rap / Hip Hop is not something you would associate with Ireland. I can’t imagine that there are many rap battles in Sligo, so how did you guys hook up? Myster E: Myself and Shaool did a battle of the bands for the craic back in secondary school. We tested the waters in front of a school full of young fellas. We got a few gigs from that and recorded a terrible demo with some ‘big shot’ producer in Dublin, hopefully it’ll never see the light of day. Noone was making beats and DJing around town and he caught wind of us. He invited u

Originally published 10/09/2013 on Chunk.ie So, there I was, wandering around the Electric Picnic wondering who I was going to watch next. One of the lads said he had heard good things about King Kong Company and that we should check them out, so off we headed to the Body and Soul Arena to do just that.  As I mentioned in my review of the Electric Picnic, the gig was epic.  I figured we just had to interview them here on CHUNK.ie, and here it is! First things first, congratulations on a storming gig at the Electric Picnic. It completely blew me away.  Was this your first Picnic experience? We’ve been to many Electric Picnics over the years but just as punters, and it’s always been a great festival, so it was a fantastic experience to play at its 10 year anniversary. King Kong Company is a rather interesting name for a band, where or how did you come up with it? The name is taken from the film Taxi Driver. If you look closely, Travis Bickle is wearing a badge which says King

Originally published July 2013 on Chunk.ie A big céad míle fáilte to The Standstills from us here at CHUNK.ie We’ve been listening to your track Jesus over and over and over again here at CHUNK HQ and I think it has safely worked its way in to our Top 5 tracks of the year. Having said that, your cover of Black Betty is outstanding… It brings back memories of drunken moshing on the dance floor at Nijinskys night club… Fun times! Maybe you could give us a brief history about yourselves and the band. How did the Standstills come about?   We met in a music program and became really good friends, we had a lot of the same tastes in music and both of us loved to go to live shows..  For a while I had been doing a solo blues thing, but really wanted to jam with a band.. Renee had played drums in a couple different projects in the past, and liked what i was doing so it was inevitable that we should jam.. We really hit it off and since then we've kept on going. You’re obviously fr

Originally published 04/07/2013 on Chunk.ie Welcome to CHUNK.ie Sensorites, how the hell are you?  Enjoying the hot balmy summer days with a nice cool pint of cider?? Kind of, we’re currently locked in the bat cave (our studio down by the docks), and will be until the album is finished. There’s no natural light in the bat cave, it stops the sun from teasing us, our studio tans are coming on a treat! Needless to say bursts of daylight exposure are met with squinty eyes and a slight sizzling of the skin. * You hail from Liverpool, that much I know, but can you tell us a bit more about the band? We all live in Liverpool, but aren’t born and bred scousers.  My brother Gareth Kirkham (Bass/Vocals) and I (Natham Kirkham: Vocals/Guitar) hail from Stoke-on-Trent.  We migrated to Liverpool years ago in search of richer musical pastures. Alan Falcon (Drums) is originally from…. drum roll please….. Wing, Leighton Buzzard.  Much to our amusement that’s his real name and address! Congrat

Originally published 13/06/2013 on Chunk.ie It’s not often you get the chance to interview your favourite bands, but thanks to CHUNK.ie and having a brass neck, I’m working my way through the list! I’ve been a fan of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes since… well for more years than I care to remember.  One of the guys I worked with walked into the office with Have a Ball and it was the start of a sixteen year love affair with the band!  But enough about me, let’s get to the questions. Spike, how the hell are you?  What’s happening with the band?  I believe you guys are back in the studio recording again. I am well, thanks…  Busking with Uke-Hunt, recording a new Re-Volts record, and slinging pizzas for the man.  Did I forget to mention the Gimmes are well into the process of tracking a new record?  I don’t wanna spoil the surprise but as far as the theme goes, suffice it to say there’s one in all of us. Our readers are an educated lot, really they are, but some of them may not

Originally published 14/05/2013 on Chunk.ie A few weeks back, I noticed I had a new follower on Twitter.  I don’t have many, so when someone decides to follow me, I get curious.  My new follower turned out to be  My Tribe Your Tribe .  The name alone was interesting so I decided to take a look at their profile and see what they were about.  It turns out that MTYT are a band and George Mercer is the creative force behind them.  Oh and as luck would have it, they had just released a  free EP  for download. Since we are nice people here at CHUNK.ie and we like to promote up and coming acts, we thought we’d get in contact with George  and see what MTYT were about. You can read how we got on down below! Hi George, no dilly-dallying here, we’ll get straight in to the questions!   “My Tribe Your Tribe”  is a great name for a band.  It conjures up a meeting of minds and people, marriage even.  Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and where did the idea for the name came from? Th

Originally published May 2013 on Chunk.ie It’s been a while since you released Memory Muscle, your debut solo album and this, the follow up, A Flash of Darkness.  Has it been a case of the difficult second album, or did you just fancy some time away from music after the break up of The Bluetones? It's been 5 years in fact. An inordinately long time between 2 records, I'll give you that, but I haven't been entirely idle in that time. There was the writing/recording/touring of the Bluetones' album 'A New Athens', and then the whole farewell tour thing when we decided that we were going to draw that little story to a close. That said, some of the songs for this album were written in the summer of 2010. So I suppose it has had quite a long gestation. You decided on funding the recording of A Flash of Darkness using the PledgeMusic service. What was the thinking behind that? Did it offer a lot more freedom to make the album you wanted to make without having

Over the next few days, you'll notice some Chunk.ie interviews appearing on the site. Well a few years ago, I used to do some interviews, write some pieces and draw some cartoons for Chunk. Unfortunately Chunk.ie is no more, so rather than have those pieces disappear off the face of the internet, I thought I’d post those them on my own site. There are more to come, some with models, sports stars and authors… I’ll post them over the coming days / months / years... Who knows, you might even like them!