2022-05-06 JoJo Levesque - The Academy, Dublin

Two years ago, I saw a tweet saying that 3 times Grammy Award Nominated JoJo Levesque was going to be playing the Academy in Dublin as part of her UK & Ireland Tour.

Now, her style of music wouldn't ordinarily be my scene, but she is a Grammy Nominee and has an incredible voice, so I thought 'why the hell not' and I booked a ticket.

That show was to take place on August 31st of 2020, but we all know what happened... Due to Covid restrictions, the show was rescheduled until October 6th 2021. Well, as luck would have it, Covid did not disappear and so rather than reschedule again, the show was cancelled and refunds were issued.

Sometime in October 2021, the show was announced again with a new date in May 2022, but still in the Academy, so I bought another ticket, hoping it would go ahead. As you can see from the title of this post, it most certainly did!

So, the gig, how was it? Well, it was excellent. JoJo has an incredible voice and her band were superb. Not being the biggest JoJo fan, I wasn't aware of a lot of her catalogue, but I knew the hits and sang along with everyone else.

Speaking of everyone else, they knew all the words, of every song and sang their hearts out. It was great to see.

I've said it before, it's always good to step outside your comfort zone and go see or do something you're not used to. Tonight was one of those times and I really enjoyed it.

My only issue was with the the use of smoke. Bad lighting I can cope with, but the use of heavy smoke is just annoying. Also, JoJo has a tour photographer with her, so bringing the DSLR was out of the question.

I'm not overly delighted with my photos, but they're a record of the night, so here they are!

2022-03-26 Buskers on Grafton Street, Dublin

I took a walk around Dublin today, thought I'd check out the buskers on Grafton Street. There's a fine history of busking in Dublin, acts like Hothouse Flowers , The Frames , Rodrigo y Gabriela , Damien Rice , Paddy Casey , Kodaline and a host of others all cut their teeth on and around Grafton Street. It stands to reason that some of those busking today will be successful in the future! So, who did I get to see today? Well, check out the photos below: Zoe Clarke Allie Sherlock Paul Jenkinson

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 i

Interview with King Kong Company

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

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