2019-03-15 John Spillane - McAuley Place Naas

I do like going to see John Spillane play… It’s much more than a music gig, the interaction with the crowd is great, the stories within the songs and, indeed, between songs are fantastic.

So, when I saw he was coming to Naas again, sure I had to go. The gig was in the beautiful Nuns Chapel in McAuley Place. As you may have guessed from its name, it used to be a chapel, but it’s now an arts centre. The sound in there is just beautiful and warm.

Support on the night was from the excellent Enda Reilly. I’d not seen Enda play before, but I really enjoyed what I saw of his set (I was a little late getting to the gig!).

John invited Enda back up on stage towards the end of the gig just to wrap it all up.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s John Spillane in the Nuns Chapel in McAuley Place in Naas.

Check out the photos below:

Bye Bye Spotify...

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

2019-09-06 Naas Wild Food Festival

What's this? The Naas Wild Food Festival ?? On a music blog??? Well... Yeah, actually it is. But fear not, I wasn't there for the food, I'd only music on my mind and this was the first gig of a packed weekend! Actually, I'd already eaten before going, so I wasn't in the mood to try any of the stalls there, but I'm sure they were all delicious! They actually shut down Poplar Square in Naas for this festival tonight. The last time I remember the main street in Naas being shut was for the pig races way back, years ago, for the Punchestown Festival. I was going to say there were no pigs tonight, but I do recall seeing a stall serving Hog, so yeah... Anyway, the music. Tonight we had Sina Theil open the proceedings. I've seen Sina plenty of times over the last few years and she puts on a very good country rock show. A good mix of her own songs and some well known crowd pleasers. After Sina, we had some legends of the Irish music scene, we had Kila p

2018-09-15 Hey Troubadour - Whelans Dublin

A few months back, a friend mentioned a gig that was taking place in Whelans in September. Glen Hansard , David Keenan , Mark Geary and a few others were all due to play. It sounded like a good night out and hey, it was in aid of a charity, so I just had to go! Turns out that the charity in question was Aidlink . So who are they? Well, Aidlink are an Irish NGO working with communities in Kenya, Ghana & Uganda to deliver basic needs such as water, education, healthcare and promoting & protecting Girls' Rights. That’s a very worthy cause so go check out their website . OK, that’s the reason we were all there out of the way, so who played you’re probably wondering. Well lots, lots of artists played! I don’t have photos of everyone unfortunately, fun got in the way of taking photos at times! The main gig was downstairs in Whelans, each artist played 2 or 3 songs and things moved along nicely. I also caught a few acts live that I'd never seen before such as A

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