2022-12-18 Merchy Christmas - The Grand Social, Dublin

Merchy Christmas, in The Grand Social, serves two purposes. First and foremost, it gives music fans a chance to meet some of their favourite artists and to buy their merch. Stickers, Posters, Beanies, Baseball Caps, Scarves, T-Shirts, Hoodies, Tapes, CDs, Vinyl... Whatever you wanted, you could find!

The second purpose of Merchy Christmas is to help raise funds for the Simon Community. If you're not aware, the Simon Community is a charity which helps homeless people. It's incredible that we have a housing crisis in Ireland. It seems to be a mix of greed, mismanagement and, well, ineptitude. If you couldn't make it to Merchy Christmas, but would still like to make a donation, just click here.

On Friday, Merchy Christmas put a call out for photographers to attend the event. I couldn't make Saturday, but said I'd be there Sunday for a few hours. I met up with some old friends, made some new friends and took some pretty photos. I came home a lot poorer finically from this, but the craic was great and I got to catch-up with some great folk, so it all balances out!

Anyway, time for some photos. First up it's the wonderful Daire Heffernan:

Next up was the fantastic Krea (yes, that is Karen from Wyvern Lingo):

And finally, the brilliant Carslbad.

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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