Saturday 16 April Bright and early, three old-school musicians and a young gunslinger of an engineer arrived at Hellfire Studios in the Dublin Mountains. All my albums start off the same way, with the same 4 core personnel. Apart from myself, there’s Dick Farrelly (guitars and bass), Ger Farrelly (drums and percussion) and Mick Heffernan (engineer … Read More
Blog
Radio Days – a love song to radio
“Radio Days” is my new single, released on 28 July. It’s all about the enduring importance of radio – even today when music can be consumed in so many different ways. I won a cassette tape recorder as a prize in a competition at school. They weren’t long on the market and I’d never seen … Read More
Listening to the rain (a lot) in Australia
Sometimes the nicest things that happen to musicians are actually quite random. Like the fact that an Australian radio station has “adopted” one of my songs and has now been playing it on a daily basis (and sometimes more) for three months. Banks Radio Australia has played Listen To the Rain more than 100 times … Read More
Any Other World – a song of hope
Last May, during the first lockdown, the weather was glorious. Each day I’d sit in the garden, enjoying a coffee in the sunshine and listening to the music of the birds as they enjoyed the freedom denied to us. A song emerged, I put it on one of my daily Facebook performances. That led to … Read More
Walk Away – single and video
Walk Away is one of my favourite tracks on the new album and it has been a very popular live song since I started performing it in 2018. I’m releasing it as a single on September 28 and I’ve just launched a video to promote it. You can see the video here. I’m really pleased with the … Read More
Announcing my new album!
Ageing With Attitude is my fifth album and (as you’d expect me to say) my best to date. In February I reassembled my core crew and got to work in Black Mountain Studios in the Cooley Peninsula where we laid the foundations with drum, bass, guitar and piano tracks (and some unreal harmonies from Thomas … Read More
A retro song hits the mark with the radio DJs
When COVID-19 shut everything down, including the recording of my album Ageing With Attitude, only one track was fully complete. Fortunately, Go With You was a song that I had earmarked as a possible single, so I decided that I might as well release it in the hope of picking up some airplay during the lockdown. That turned out to … Read More
Song from the Lockdown
I played my last gig on Tuesday 10 March. By the following weekend, all music venues were closing. I also had to abandon work in the studio on my album Ageing With Attitude which was 75% complete. Everything else I was involved in, including the football matches I attend and the social football I play … Read More
I found a home….
Two years ago this week I rocked up to Darkey Kelly’s to try out the Tuesday Singer-Songwriter Night for the first time, on the recommendation of Liam Oragh who told me it would suit my music perfectly. That was one of the best bits of advice I’ve ever received. I soon became part of the furniture … Read More
Ageing with Attitude
I really think that Ageing with Attitude is a great title for a column. It runs weekly in the lifestyle supplement of the Examiner, written by Margaret Jennings, and this was what she ran on 28 December. BY day he was working with ministers and dealing with government policy and legislation, but behind closed doors … Read More