*OMG*

My first story ever published….featured on the cover to boot! Ah, it only took two and a half years’ hangovers to write!

Thanks to everyone who read the original

Q: What is the real underground scene in Ireland right now?
A: There isn’t one.
No real scene, that is, no one, genre-bound seam of gold snaking through the country, uniting long-lost solidarities and laying previous crimes in music to rest. Where there was once a North against South, rock vs rave demand to choose your field and stick to it, Ireland has cast aside another weight of expectation. We’re disparate now, eclectic and exhilarated with it, flooded with choice and preferences.
An Egyptian magazine approached me for a piece defining the country’s underground music climate. How do you explain the buzz preceding a much-anticipated album or great gigs to people who’ve never been at Radiator and have no basis for judgement? What defines ‘underground’? Is it a lifestyle, a fashion, regime, attitude? Is it post-rock, punk or psychedelica? A promise on a flyer? Does underground extend above and beyond pogoing bruisers, stage-diving, moshing? Is it the frisson that comes with breathing the same air as three hundred other frenzied be-boppers at the Saturday night hop?
I think it’s the creeping sensation of secretive smugness when a band command every fibre of my being via soundwaves and I screw up eyes, wishing they never make it big, stay wonderful, obscure and untainted forever. But that’s no defining angle to write from: that’s just me.
Instead I decided to take a unromanticised stance on ‘underground’: the antithesis of corporate Irish music industry, these are The Domestics, Mildreds of Irish music who come out at night when the reps and execs have left, tidy desks and empty wastepaper baskets. They do the hard work. They are unsung, name-known by few and it is they who power rumbling machines in underground chambers.

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