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Growing up in Clonakilty you are surrounded by music.

Dukkha frontman Eoin O’Neill grew up with people who were genuinely passionate about music and that has always stayed with him. His older brother, uncles, and aunts would show him a variety of music from all different genres and eras, allowing him to appreciate music holistically.

He says that this holistic approach to music has been one of the major influences on his song writing. Another major influence was the discovery of his favourite band, The Doors, and other 1960s psychedelic bands like Jefferson Airplane and Love. Jim Morrison’s song writing showed him, more than anyone else had before, that lyrics can be a form of poetry. This idea blossomed with his growing interest with rap albums, especially concept albums that had particular themes. He was blown away by certain rappers ability to speak of situations in life completely alien to his own, yet was, because of their words, able to understand and empathise with them.

EUGENE BROSNAN 

celebrating the 30year anniversary of his debut album ‘Well he said he’d be Here!’

Well he said he’d be here!

In 1995, having lived in Clonakilty for a few years prior, I decided that I would record a CD! No real experience but with enthusiasm and a whole bunch of friends, family and the odd unsuspecting, visiting musician! 10 songs were recorded in 8 days and two days were put aside to mix, not a lot of time to mix 10 songs but needs must…eight of the songs were my compositions and it also included a beautiful song, by Jeremiah O’Keeffe, about watching his nephew grow up, perhaps a little too fast and a catchy folksy ballad, penned by Colm O’Sullivan, local educator, musician and visual artist.

After spinning my dream to some friends and family, all were supportive in their various ways, none more so than 16 year old prodigy, John Fitzgerald, now a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and engineer. He helped arrange the songs and suggested the musicians to choose for certain pieces, propelling the project along nicely.

Nick Harper was over a few times to record with his dad and to work on his first two solo records. We became buddies quickly and his boundless energy and his off-the -scale talent, was so welcomed, from the first notes he played on Miles & Miles, one of my favourites on the album.

Clonakilty is always in bloom in my eyes, but it never shone brighter than it did in those days in the mid 90s, when Hothouse Flowers were regular visitors and I had the pleasure to jam and play with their amazing drummer Jerry Fehily and I felt blessed when he came to the Dublin sessions and played drums on 5 of the rockier tracks. Les Sampson did the drums on 3 of the other acoustic songs, including the aforementioned Miles & Miles, listening to it now, 30 years later, you can hear what he was the chosen kit man for the likes of Steve Marriot and Noel Redding It blew my mind. Inspired by the solo work of the Alarm’s Dave Sharp, I decided to split the album, 5 up tempo, Rock/Pop songs and 5 folksy, acoustic songs. It made sense to me in more ways than one. As luck would have it, the great virtuoso guitarist and Clon man, Bill Shanley, was laying down guitars on Paul Harrington’s album at another studio in Temple Bar, so he jumped in for some of the sessions there and elevated things somewhat with his driving, colourful and melodic sound.

Kieran Kiely (Sinead O’Connor, Shane McGowan) heard about the session from one of the lads. No mobile phone in those days to announce our impending arrivals, so, Kieran just showed up and set up his keyboards, with a very confused engineer who had heard nothing about a keyboards player. Kieran assured him, “twill be grand”! It was much better than grand. Thank you Kieran.

The writer of the second song on Well he said he’d be here !, Colm O’Sullivan, also played piano and arranged string parts for the Rossmore sessions, adding depth to the acoustic songs with their sparse arrangements. My bestie at the time was bassist supreme, Noel Barrett. He and I had worked at my home set up in Ardfield, on the demos, a few weeks prior to the recording dates and shared the bass duties with John Fitzgerald.  At both sessions, Neil Amor (The Christians, Chris Rea, Nick Harper) was at the helm, keeping everyone and everything calm and relaxed and moving despite the  sometimes chaotic happenings.  At the time Neil was co-credited with the production, but looking back now, Well he said he’d be here! was produced by a group of musicians, family and a bighearted community spirit, somehow all gathered together during during a very special time for music in Clonakilty.

Nowadays, artwork may not mean what it did back then, when the booklet and front and back covers of your CD, were a very important part of the music, having it in your hands, reading the lyrics, finding out who played the drums, staring at the photos or artwork, while the music played was always special to me and I remember being delighted when I saw the proofs, prepared  by Liz Twomey, for the photos, artwork and layout. Happy Days indeed.

“Caustic, inventive, insightful, and funny as fuck” – Golden Plec

”For me the best songwriter in the country at the moment is Jinx Lennon, and he matters. He matters to me. And we don‘t hear him because he’s telling the truth. He’s singing about this island we live in as it is, and he doesn’t get airplay. Why doesn’t he get airplay? …Because he’s telling the truth. And why can’t people deal with that truth?… Because it’s very raw, and he doesn’t sugar it up.” -Christy Moore

BOB CHRISTGAU, VILLAGE VOICE

Chances are you’ve never heard of Jinx Lennon. Even in Ireland he’s far from famous, and except for a 2015 house party I got to attend, his only NYC-area gigs came in 2005 via Lach, whose amorphously contrarian “antifolk” catchall suits Lennon as it does few others. Structurally, he’s a singer-songwriter, earning his musical pittance performing his own songs over acoustic guitar. But that not only undersells his hyperactive show and ignores his live beat gear and studio horns, it misrepresents the aggressiveness of half-rapped, power-strummed rants far less predictable and more propulsive than, for instance, the rote metrics of original “punk poet” John Cooper Clarke. It misses how irrepressibly Lennon shouts and how insistently he repeats linchpin phrases. And it evokes a limpid lyricism he almost never trucks with, although he knows full well that his sing-along choruses are what render him inspirational in the end. My favorite goes: “No need to feel that you are a toerag/You’re not a scumbag, yeah, you’re not a scumbag.” But there are many others, and he means them all.

Lennon lives in and sings about his hometown of Dundalk in Ireland’s northeast corner, which in more storied times spawned both Cuchulain and Saint Brigid. Since 2000 he’s recorded seven albums for his own label, christened Septic Tiger in a prophetic dig at the Celtic Tiger, as the credit bubble then “modernizing” the Irish economy was dubbed by the kind of fool he isn’t. But by 2000 he was already 36, an age when most DIY-ers conclude that their music is avocational if the business of living leaves them time to play out at all. Not Lennon–not exactly. The oldest child of a line worker turned homeless counselor and a holistic healer, Lennon did construction in London after leaving school. Almost always in bands, he spent 1985 in New York, where he worked in a uniform factory and at South Street Seaport while supporting a vinyl habit long on Velvets and Television bootlegs. Then it was Dundalk and the dole and several more bands culminating in the alt-pop Novena Babes, whose sole SoundCloud track is far tamer than the solo music he’d soon put together. Yet in 2000 he too took on a job–as a hospital porter manning the night shift one week so he’d be free to tour the next. Seventeen years later, the 52-year-old father of a nine-month-old is still a porter. And he still plays out when he can.

This unusual profile explains a lot about a body of work you can stream on Spotify and buy from Amazon, although he’ll do better if you patronize his Bandcamp page. The two new ones are the Clinic-backed Magic Bullets of Madness and the hour-long Past Pupil Stay Sane, driven by a full band sound with plenty of rudimentary beatmaking, frequent trumpet, and occasional “girl voice” from his wife, Sophie Coyle. They’re his first new music since 2010’sNational Cancer Strategy, which he now regards as “not enough fun” for reasons a listen to the gruesome revenge fantasy “Pink Scrunched Up Thing” will soon reveal. My own favorite is 2006’s Know Your Station Gouger Nation, which follows “Accept Yr. Hair Loss” with “Nigerians (Stop Going On About)” and precedes “You Are No Scumbag” with the spiritual “Forgive the Cnts” (“If you don’t forgive the cunts/You’ll never find the peace inside you want”) and the enraged “Rap-S-Scallions” (“Two kicks in the head for being old/Three kicks in the head for being weak”). But every one is worth hearing, and not merely because they’re so rooted in Dundalk, which for geographical reasons was more embroiled in the Troubles than most and has since suffered plenty of lower-case trouble under capitalism rampant.

Equipped with a memorable little tune, Past Pupil Stay Sane‘s “I Know My Town” isn’t a rap or rant. It’s fully a song, with plenty going on. Understandably, however, Lennon fans gravitate to its middle verse, which situates him artistically: “I know my town, I know my town/Me, I know every smell from sewer pipes to the chip shops to the bullshit I hear round me constantly.” “There’s good things and there’s bad things here,” he goes on. But though his lyrics adduce bits of local color that will add concreteness for any listener while only fully resonating with his Dundalk homies, I suspect he’d be writing similar songs in nearby Navan or Mullingar, because it’s the characters that make them extraordinary–the kind of working people country represents by shuttling hunks from the weight room to the roadhouse and folk music sentimentalizes when it remembers them at all. None of them are starving and none of them have enough money. More are good than bad, but none are saints and most are messed up–like the young woman with flavored latex on her bed table in “Next Slow Song You Hear May Leave You Pregnant” or the boring cousin in “Gobshyt in the House,” both old songs, or like the aged aunt serving a “sandwich that’s like insulation for six attics for 65 years” or the “10 O’Clock T Break Bollix” who puts co-workers down so the lads will like him but isn’t bollix enough to believe they do, both new ones. Of the four, only the gobshite is unsympathetic.

Except in the crucial sense that he understands class, Lennon is not a protest singer. Occasionally the rich will horn in for a few lines, but mostly Lennon means to warn the local good guys about the bad guys itching to fuck them up. His primary goal is to convince them that, as Past Pupil Stay Sane concludes, “Every Day Above Ground Is a Good Day” even so. No more than five-foot-six himself, Lennon gets heated about bullies, with a special animus for the rapscallion hards who kick heads for the fun of it, and has written more home-invasion songs than most people. These include “So Frightened,” the opener on his live debut album, which I found so frightening myself I assumed it was autobiographical until the part that explains it’s based on a newspaper account. When you stream it, pay attention to the spoken intro:

 

 

“Before I start off I just want to say something. I just want to say that if anyone around this town thinks I’m up here trying to take the piss out of people I just want to make sure, I just want to make sure that I am not about that at all. I’m about fucking uplifting people.”

https://youtu.be/MRw4kQICs3s

There’s a revolution happening. And it’s not going to be quiet.

Conceived at Clonakilty International Guitar Festival 2018 and birthed just before the biggest annual celebration of women in West Cork, Nollaig na mBan for Ovacare, The Kates took Clonakilty by storm.

Liz Clark (gtr), Eve Clague (elec gtr), Mide Houlihan (drums), Roisin Kilgannon (keys) and Paula K O’Brien (bass) are all musicians/songwriters in their own right but banded together to shine a spotlight on what contributions women make in a male dominated industry. 

The Kates only play songs performed or written by women. They celebrate women who have come before them, blazed a trail and rocked the system. 

Viva la revolution.

Matt Gordon has been living in the woodwork of the music business. He’s a great Fiddler, Clogger, Hamboner, and Harmonica player. He toured in the 80s and 90s with the Fiddle Puppet Dancers, taking part in the London debut of Riverdance, and participating in festivals around North America and Europe, with that group.

His CD with Leonard Podolak and their pal Bill Shanley called ‘Three Thin Dimes’ is the first full recorded effort on his part, and although he knows many people in the tribe, and has laid a track or two, on other Cds he has not toured much in the last few years, focusing on his career as a woodworker, and cabinet maker.

Ciaran Calnan ….AKA RAWNEY , Formerly of SETMAKER, KARNAGE,THE KLUTZ, SMOG TOWN RATS, ESL TEAM , Clonakilty AFC , Clonakilty Rugby Club, DeBarras ….

many talents come and GROW in clonakilty but Rawney’s voice, guitar playing, drumming and all round musicality make him one of #guitartowns MVPs…….if you haven’t seen him before nows your chance…because you can be damn sure anyone who has is gonna be at this show…youll be greeted with new songs as Rawney goes virtual for guitar town with a new EP due to be released in the not too distant future

David Christy Jones is a 28-year old songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in West Cork, Ireland. Born in Wales to a musical family, he found himself surrounded by musicians playing from a young age. At 7 years old he relocated to Clonakilty, Ireland with his family.

On April 17th, 2021 David released his debut album – the nightmarish and one of a kind ‘Welcome To Virology’. Inspired by the blues and folk stars of old; modern contemporary rock and pop; classical music and the avante-garde – he has taken their recipes and added his own distinct flavour. His style is undoubtedly unique and fresh.

Since 2009, David has been an active and respected session drummer, bassist, guitarist, and vocalist and has played with countless acts across all genres. From jazz, blues, and folk to heavy metal, rap, and country. He has performed in many bands over numerous genres and toured in Europe, The UK, and the USA.

What are people saying about Welcome To Virology?

“The debut album by Cork’s David Christy Jones is as colourful and versatile as the new reality we are still trying to cope with. His debut album is a satiric, serious, and nihilist approach on how to survive this madness.”
-Mangorave

“An outstanding mixture of progressive rock, funk, rap and social critique, “Welcome To Virology” is an honest and majestic musical work from Irish eccentric multi-instrumentalist, David Christy Jones. It’s a broad expedition of witty lyrics and unconventional musical composition.” -Lessthan1000followers.com

“This material is an experimental masterpiece by all means.”
-punk-rocker.com”A sound that mixes Funky, Prog Rock and many other musical genres in a unique and original recipe. Lively, innovative songs that manage to keep you on tip of your chair from the first to the last second. A fantastic discovery that I recommend everyone to listen to with an open mind.”
-edgarallenpoets.com

The brilliance of this album is that Jones goes all in. This assuredness and dedication in songwriting is wonderfully refreshing and reaps maximum reward in this instance.
It’s blatantly obvious from this record that we are dealing with an artist who is humming with creative energy and, most importantly, has the conviction to take that creativity to extreme places.
-demarsmagazine.com

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