With a new album and a new outlook, Gemma Hayes is right back on form. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Tipperary songstress about her quest for musical redemption.

January 25, 2008. Unseasonably warm rain has washed the hills of Beachwood Canyon for more than four days - creating fast running gullies, impromptu puddles and a new whitewashed look of freshness.
As the mist finally gives way to California sunshine, the rain-soaked landscape begins to shimmer in a kaleidoscope of brilliant light. A liquid horizon, an oil painting that never quiet dried - Los Angles has never looked so beautiful.
Curled before her bay window Gemma Hayes sits to write. Still wet from her slow walk in the torrent, drip-drops from her hair mingle and blotch with ink as she writes and writes. Oblivious to the staining, she works unheeded. True confessions can bear no distraction.
This is a day of self atonement, a day for Gemma Hayes to draw a line under her musical past, her record label days, and re-announced herself to the world. She write a letter to her fans.
“It can be so hard to really connect with people. I really just wanted to do something where I felt that I was really opening up to people…

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Irish hip-hop sits on the cusp of one very big wave. As he waits to get soaked, Steo (aka Konchus Lingo, aka Stephen Gunn) of The Infomatics, chats to Andrew Hamilton about achieving real credibility and the search for a sound.

FIVE years is a long time to spend grafting. Touring and writing is one thing, but ask any band and they’ll quickly tell you that to be truly able to stand up on a chair (perchance in a pub, perhaps late at night) and proclaim to the gathered punters that you are in fact a musician (hear me roar), well that takes the confidence that only an album can bring.
For those with an album, music is a career. But for those without, well, music still sits somewhere between a pass-time and a handy few bob (stare at your feet, kick that imaginary tyre). An album is like a musical cherry, and after it’s popped, life really is different.

So for Steo and his Infomatic, writing and touring since the early months of 2003, the temptation must surely have been mighty to dive in and announce themselves to the world with a round metal and plastic calling card. But like a good Catholic virgin of old, The Infomatics decided to wait.

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There was a time when being told that you were funky meant a slap in the face and an evening in the bath. Andrew Hamilton talks to Colin Bartley from Limerick band Walter Mitty and the Realists, who are bring the funk back out west.

Every scene has it’s characters and Limerick is no different. From the unbridled angst grinding metal of Giveamanakick and the rock and rock euphoria of Vesta Varro to the avant-garde power pop of We Should Be Dead and the heart felt acoustics of Eoin Coughlan, Limerick is a town with all it’s musical basses covered.
Where then, among this ever crowded soundscape, is there room for Walter Mitty and the Realists? Where then indeed?
Like a musical Moses standing atop to slow-moving ebb of the Shannon, this Limerick/Leitrim four-piece has discover the possess the power to turn mere water into funk. And people are queuing to be baptized.
“Myself personally I’m into a lot of funk and jazz and rock. We are into a lot of different kinds of music and I think the sound evolved from all of this. The writing then came after that and the sound changed again, you know, when we started writing together as a band. We weren’t really thinking which route to go. We were just jamming and the songs came out of that,” says bassist Colin.

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A year after the big split and the Beautiful South’s Dave Rotheray is back and hungry for more. With a new album in the ether, Andrew Hamilton chats to the Hull troubadour about creative control and the relative merits of country music.
If 20 odd years in the music business has thought Dave Rotheray anything, it’s the importance of control. Since early Summer 1989, when Paul Heaton asked him to join the fledgling Beautiful South, Dave has been one part of a big team, a musical company-man.
It’s the natural order of things, bands by definition are often more about compromise and conciliation than full creative freedom. And in bands, more often than not, you’re going to lose more battles than you win. This goes doubly so when you’re the chief songwriter of a a band with two chief songwriters.Now, as a resurgent Rotheray prepares to launch his third album under the Homespun moniker, he holds all the cards. Despite the presence of heavyweight musicians such as Tony Robinson (Super Furry Animals), Claire Mactaggart (Portishead) and Gary Hammond (the Nina Simone band), things are finally getting done Dave’s way.“It starts with me on my own. I have a mate called Alan, who lives down the street from me, and when I have written something new I play it for him on tape or whatever. That tends to be the song. I get all the others up for a weekend and they get all of their bit down, including the singing of course.” he said.

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Believe it to not, the most popular new Irish band of 2007 are from Clare, and no-one has ever heard of them. Andrew Hamilton talks to The Human Jigsaw, half of Lisdoonvarna’s breakcore sensation, Drugzilla.

Lisdoon is famous for a lot of things. There’s the wells, drenched in the slow sticky stench of sulphur and chalybeate. Then there’s the matchmaking, with it’s dancing and cajoling, and the sweet molasses sent of the porter in the taps. Then, of course, there also the real festival - the one with Christy and Rory Gallagher, and yes, I suppose, it’s fair share of porter too.
The latest shot at success to emerge from Lisdoonvarna however, is flavoured with the sickly sweet taste of Buckfast, and despite already boasting a huge worldwide audience has gone largely unnoticed in Ireland.
In the twelve short months since Lisdoonvarna duo The Human Jigsaw and Manimal came together to form Drugvilla, the pair have collected a huge following through Myspace, and all this before they play a single gig or release so much as an EP.
“The whole thing has been a huge surprise. We started it as a laugh and just see how things would go and then the next thing that we know there is more than 20,000 friends on Myspace and 50,000 listens. It’s great. We just have to see how far we can take it,” says The Human Jigsaw.

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After making their name as soft rock songsmiths, Pier Nineteen have turned the amps all the way up to eleven. Andrew Hamilton chats to guitarist Dave Clancy.

It’s tough carrying the weight of a town. But that how it’s been in Galway of late. Ask any Galwegian (imported or regular) what the city of tribes means to them and they’ll likely as not name two things; the craic and art (and yes, maybe also the Buckfast).
Yet for a place so synonymous with the arts, the music scene in Galway has lived a fairly charmed life of late. In the dark days of the ‘90’s and ‘00’s, cover bands ruled the roost, and the Galway scene began to fade - being replace by Cork, Limerick and even Sligo as one of the music capitals of the west.
And though things have started to improve, the people of Galway still await their musical messiahs. With just the Saw Doctors and the Stunning (and we all know where they really come from) to show by way of mainstream success, each great new musical hope has been saddled with twenty odd years of expectation.
One such band is Pier Nineteen.
“The Galway scene has definitely bounced back in the last few years. There is some good stuff around, some really good local bands. It’s been the strongest it has been since the days of the Stunning,” said Dave.

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In his most intimate interview in year, Galway crime author, Ken Bruen, reveals his father’s scorn for his writing career and tells of his alcoholic brother who became Jack Taylor. Words by Andrew Hamilton.

Breathless, he pulls his bike to curb and glances rapidly one way, then the next. No one had seen, he was sure of it. With a school-girl giddiness, belying each of his thirty odd year, Ken Bruen has a single moment of doubt - “six times is enough, a seventh would just be vanity”.
Yet heedless of his own warning, he mounts his bike and re-pedal his way down London’s Charing Cross Road. And there, as he knew it would be, centered in the Soho vista lies the giant arched windows of Foyles Book Shop. A sublimity in glass.
His gears tick with anticipation as he slows to a walking pace, stops and leans closer to eavesdrop.
“Funeral: Tales of Irish Morbidities, a novel by Ken Bruen. I wonder what that about,” says a elderly woman to her husband. In that moment, Ken Bruen knew he had finally made it.
But good news can sometimes travel slowly, and back home in Galway his father had other ideas.
“I wrote my first novel when I was 26 and I’d say it sold about 5 copies. I wrote two novels more mainstream novels after that, which got good reviews but didn’t sell anything…

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The choice is simple; change or die. Andrew Hamilton speaks to Balcony TV creator Stephen O’Regan about the latest great innovation in Irish music.

June 16, 1904. Dublin’s Dame Street throngs with last of the Thursday evening crowd as the final exploits of Ireland’s most famous day begin to unfurl. Unseen by the masses, Haines the Oxford student and Buck Mulligan share a pot in the tearooms of the Dublin Bread Company.
What passes between them is unheard, but even the casual spectator from the cobbled street can sense the difference. The time has come to change or die. In the twilight of that June evening the realisation finally dawns that nothing stagnant can ever endures. In the last, time will always win out.
Now fast forward a hundred odd years - to a second June evening in a second Dame Street house. On this balmy night, three young film students are about to learn the hardest lesson that Joyce had to teach.
As the final shards of June 29, 2006 egin to subside, Stephen O’Regan, Tom Millett and Pauline Freeman are about to discover that even in music, evolution is everything.
“The idea came out of nowhere really. We were sitting in our apartment one day, myself Pauline and Tom. It was a really sunny day and we had this balcony that we just never used,” says Stephen.

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The world can be a confusing place. When sorting the bizarre from the peculiar became too much, Paddy Hanna and Grand Pocket Orchestra learned to embrace the weird and roll with the punches. Andrew Hamilton reports.
If all philosophical arguments were solved through the medium of thumb-wars, the battle between Alexey Pajitnov and Paddy Hanna would be the pollex-grudge-match of the century.
Imaging the scene: Pajitnov, sat in the very red corner, removes his ushanka and strokes his gristly beard thoughtfully. While in the slightly green corner, Hanna is looking confused, confused and liking it.
On one side - a Soviet inventor who used his love of order and all things rational to bring the world Tetris, and on the other - a musicians who, along with his band, looked confusion square in the face and decide it really didn’t look that bad after all.
It’s all happened very quickly for Grand Pocket Orchestra. Having first come to notice at last year’s Hard Working Class Heroes, the Dublin 4-piece have started to carve out a home for themselves in Ireland emerging indie-electronic scene. Last Friday saw the release of their debut EP Odd Socks. Sound angry, happy, sad and enthusiastic, the aim is to bemusing and entertaining in equal measure.
“Our EP, well as far as I know, is all about confusion and fear, but expressed in a happy way. It’s kind of like pulp philosophising really - everyone is happy but we are all very confused ultimately…

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Andrew Hamilton speaks to American folk singer Danny Quinn, about his music and the recording of Sweet Ennistymon.
October 21, 1970. A US Air Force plane is forced to make an emergency landing near Leninakan in the very heart of the Soviet Union. With two senior generals on board, an entire nation is gripped as the Cold War in plunged into its biggest emergency since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
With the last of the Summer heat still think in the Connecticut air, 17-year-old Danny Quinn spends the weekend in short sleeves, playing with his rock and roll band. Oblivious to the spiralling crisis, his thoughts are only for Clapton, the Dead and even some Creedence - for the rise of Black Sabbath and the fall of the Beetles.
Yet a change was coming, and for this son of an Irish man’s son, the music of his ancestors was about to break though.
“Ya, I remember when I was first introduced to Irish music, to people like the Clancy Brother and Tommy Makem. I fell madly in love with their music almost straight away and just started imitating it.

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