Well done to Funeral Suits‘ Mick, Greg and Brian for their frantically fast-paced efforts last weekend with four phenomenal gigs, first supporting Green Lights‘ Whelans farewell on Friday before flitting to Limerick, Dublin and Belfast with Franz Ferdinand.
Major shouts to the lads who rescued me from Sunday afternoon ‘Franz are playing tonight and I don’t have a ticket’ doldrums. Not only that but they managed to wrangle a photopass for both their own and the Franz’ set. Not easy with MCD at 630 on a weekend night but they did it!
Dundalk’s Chrome Horse have made it to the finals of the International Songwriting Competition with Reflections Of A Madman. Congratulations are in order as they join the ranks of 287 finalists who beat off stiff competition from over 15,000 others to reach the crucial stage and Chrome Horse now reside in the last 16 of the Rock category.
The ISC is one of the world’s most respected songwriting competitions including judges such as Robert Smith of The Cure, Black Francis of The Pixies and Jerry Lee Lewis amongst others. It’s great to see they’ve got a chance to shine here. Check them out yourself by hitting their website: their entire Songs From The Last Revolution album is available free in either download or CD format!
Monaghan’s Green Lights played their last gig on Friday in Whelans’ Upstairs…it was a jolly affair and absolutely loads of heads turned out to wish them well. It was great to see so many different faces in various stages of happiness/inebriation/lamentation…the gig itself was like these pictures - colourful, fuzzy, slightly strange and to use Colin’s words, messy. “Messy’ in a matey ‘let’s just play ‘em to bits’ kind of way…not the standard terminology of messy which was certainly applicable to the next Irish band I saw that same night….
Anyway, check out all the props and oddities that filled out the trio’s final barnstorm.
Now I always say bands are lickable but this is beyond anything I coulda dreamed of. Loreana Rushe does dolly-pixtures of Grand Pocket Orchestra in a veritable e-number tartrazine scrumptious overload…
cc: Loreana Rushe - My Left Ventricle
Grand Pocket Orchestra play Antics at Crawdaddy tomorrow night and DJ at No Disko on Friday. Good buzz? Deadly buzz! But next week they do The utter-deadly Windmill in Brixton, London (they’re really hot on Irish bands)…before heading to shows in New York and then on to Canadian Music Week in Toronto. That’s one hella sugar rush!
You will of course recognise Paul Noonan of Bellx1 who was secretly in situ in Bewleys yesterday for a once-off private performance for Hot Press competition winners. All very hush-shush and lovely I hear.
While Friday night previously saw the launch of Heritage Centre’s EP The City, The Tree and The Fox:
Mightily sad am I to bring two cessation notices in one day…Delorentos are soon to be no more:
We’ve got some sad news.
It’s with a very heavy heart that we have to let you know that Ronan has decided to leave the band. He feels it’s best for him to move on and do other things. The three of us will still be making music and will let you know what happens next.
As our songs always came from the four of us playing together we’ve also decided that it wouldn’t feel right to continue “delorentos” without him.
We’re all very proud of the songs we’ve written over the last year, we feel they’re some of the best we’ve ever done, and as a result we’re determined not to discard them or let them go.
Next month, the four of us are going to record this album together and plan on making it something we’ll all be proud of. It’ll be our last collection of songs as delorentos, and we hope you’ll like them.
We want to thank everyone that’s supported us since we started, we’d never have gotten this far without you. We hope to play a gig or two to say goodbye.
We’ll be in touch soon with more details.
Ross, Níal and Kieran and Ro
One of the best-loved bands of recent years, they were bright, cheery indieheads with great tunes, marauding guitars, immensely singable, bright and fresh. Without them, I would not be sitting here now…I was just saying to Ian Thrillpier the other week that Delorentos were the band who got me into the Irish scene proper - Hot Press were behind the lads from the outset. I met Kier at a Christmas interview in 2005 and a few months later, blagged my first photopass: their April 2006 gig in Whelans. Up til then I was loving Franz, Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian…I had no idea there was better on my own doorstep. I’m not the only one who found them inspiring - The Kinetiks were incredibly impressed by their North Dublin neighbours and Jacqui Carroll attributes her discovery of Irish music to an early Delos~ show while UnaRocks, John Walshe of State, Jonnie Craig and countless others championed their sound.
The Leave It On EP sold-out in shops immediately on its release - a comment I left on the Delorentos profile asking how to get a copy led to meeting two lovely friends, one of whom hunted down the elusive record as a gift. The title track remains a constant favourite to this day - if I close my eyes and listen, I go back to the heady start.
Time passed and new music kept coming:just like good NSMA winners, In Love With Detail was considered a worthy candidate for last year’s Choice Prize. Our paths crossed repeatedly, from tiny venues to the huge oul’ barn formerly known as The Point, at the biggest festivals Oxegen and Electric Picnic to the smallest and most independent. They worked their arses off, gigging the length and breadth of the country, playing shows in Italy, the UK and US and yet never looked or sounded tired, would always, always smile, wave and come say hello. Unlike BellX1, it was always enough to be loved by those at home.
When I last saw Ronan at HWCH in September, we had a great chat about the band’s new direction and he was full of praise for developing bands, especially The Parks. It’s good to know there’ll be one last dash of Delorentos flavour, a final parting shot of that north Dublin spirit which paved the way for guitar bands to reclaim Irish stages from singer-songwriters. Doing it for the kids til the end.
His name is Chris, not “the super-hot drummer in asiwyfa“. Although he is super-hot. In terms of hunky music, whole band are Chippendales, new haircuts, headbangs and all. Tunes to make the hardest palate drool. And yeea to the new merch, I’m never taking off my t-shirt!!
They played loud, hard and fast, at long last people got the chance to find out for themselves why I’ve been raving about this band for so long. It was superb to see so many out for two support bands at the unprecedented alternative-rock hour of 8pm on a freezing Thursday night.
So worth it tho…new material came to light, including new single Don’t Waste Time Doing Things You Hate but the all-too-short set mostly comprised lovely, faithful oldies such as I Capture Castles, The Machine and of course, wondrous And The Voiceless. I hope these pics go some way towards expressing their phenomenal energy onstage, although it’s really the military precision of their songs which sweep you off their feet. There were moments, eyes closed, I really felt as though we were on the march. Fall in…
Deadly-double-whammy noisy brilliance. That’s just the photos
Adebisi Shank and ASIWYFA supported Oxford’s This Town Needs Guns at Whelans last Thursday night and completely stole the show. You can read Paddy Murphy’s review over on Drop-D or let my pictures take you back. They’re scuzzy..it was old-school red-light photography settings for music-time: widest aperture, fastest procession, highest speed.
