Cork music in 2024 - hitting fast-forward on the future
God Alone have been unveiling new tunes.
If the crisis saw bands and artists bide their time with ideas, concepts and visions for their craft in a post-pandemic environment, some of the city’s staple artists hit the ground running at a phenomenal clip throughout 2023 - and their work is set to come to further fruition in 2024.
Having toured/gigging with Pavement, Kim Gordon and others, and impressed with most recent EP ‘Echo Boy’, Pretty Happy’s September set at the Opera House Green Room from Sounds from a Safe Harbour saw them unveil a brace of new songs that maintained their distinct Mayfield voices and idiosyncrasies, but embrace an even darker element to their storytelling, and a keenly-honed sense of focus in their songwriting. Work on a debut album has been completed, and this parish has its eyes on another mention in this one’s title…
God Alone, when their members were not up the walls in multiple other projects, were to be found gallivanting around the UK and Ireland for much of the year, touring Prosthetic Records-released album ‘ETC’. Appearances in Cork, including at the summer’s Upstart one-day festival, have seen them volunteering new tunes to audiences, leaning further into their dancey, propulsive splendour, as hinted at in interviews in this organ.
The Altered Hours have been working away over the past few years, including UK/EU touring with Fontaines DC, and a steadily-increasing profile on the festival circuit. While 2021 album Convertible saw them venture deeper into the psychedelia for which they’ve become renown among a wider international rock audience, observers at gigs have noted pangs of folk and country emerging in new material, speaking to a new chapter for the band in the new year.
When Leeside rapper Spekulativ Fiktion talks, people listen - and with a new album and launch gig slated for March, he’ll have no problem being heard again. Having been present for the genesis of the current wave of Irish hip-hop, the past decade or so has seen collaborations aplenty, including with the now-vanished Naive Ted and Mankyy, and award-winning records, as the man himself balances his body of work in hip-hop with his contributions to youth work in Cork City.
Big Boy Foolish, contrary to their moniker, are no eejits. Ricky Dineen and Liam Heffernan’s punk pedigrees are unmatched in this city, and unvarnished by the passage of time - and current-day project Big Boy Foolish sees them take a modern, post-punk, slam-performance approach with a side-helping of Leeside idiosyncracy. Debut album Stall the Ball is due out on January 26 via all the platforms - and a 12” vinyl whose sides are, amusingly, split into Northside and Southside…
One of the questions that has loomed over the independent/DIY music scene in Cork city since your writer was chundering around in baggy jeans and wallet chains has been that of the situation for music and wider arts venues in the country’s second city, and it’s an aspect of the game that makes your writer think that the dust has been quite slow to settle on the crisis years.
The venues that have proceeded with gigs since the crisis, including Cyprus Avenue, Live at St Luke’s and others, have been doing Trojan work amid a scene, and wider media consumption patterns, that have changed utterly in recent years. Indeed, it’s a bit of a muddle to try and view, from your writer’s ivory tower, how the auld struggles of putting on a gig play out anymore.
How do you gain and maintain attention for gigs in a world where, for example, posters and flyers are lesser-spotted breeds? How does one get themselves heard over the ever-intensifying din and discord of social media at all, much less long enough to get punters to click through on a ticket link?
Thankfully, attendances seem to be holding steady across the board at the city’s bigger venues, and DIY promoters/bands have been well-able to cultivate communities for themselves, while promoters like The Good Room have been taking a serious punt with their Christmas series at City Hall, sorely testing the civic facility’s sprung dancefloor with the likes of Kneecap and The Scratch walking its stages.
While The Roundy’s near-entire pivot to stand-up comedy is a loss to local music, and quayside techno experiment Crack Jenny’s seems to have given way to new tenants in the Nudes bar, more green shoots are evident - including talk of a longtime small-venue favourite of historic note to local music being prepared for action once more, and the ongoing success of super-intimate spaces like Maureen’s and PLUGD Records providing homes to a wide and eclectic array of sounds.
Elsewhere: Your writer was interested to see if the Triskel would proceed with more local and community-based gigs after hosting Pretty Happy’s documentary screening in 2022; there’s serious potential in Cyprus Avenue’s smaller side-stages Winthrop Avenue and Wavelength, while its One One Five café’s jazz sessions outline the viability of sober gigs in the city; and the wider effect of the Opera House opening up its former Half-Moon Club to gigs under the Green Room name should be noted by all as an example of the power of community engagement and involvement.
The wise would also keep their eyes on the city’s increasingly-becalmed construction sector - recession-era babies will remember developments and old facilities lying idle, ripe for proposals of DIY venues and arts centres, and while those respective vessels in their turn all hit the shore, it’s hard not to look at vacant buildings around the city and not think of the potential in a city-centre blighted by a stagnating retail sector and questions of its public realm…
Let’s start with the (white) elephant in the room: your writer’s cynicism on the Cork Events Centre project is that of the disappointed idealist. Announcements in 2016 of a civic auditorium of 6,000-10,000 capacity, capable of putting the city on an even footing with the world’s capitals for attracting big names and event programming, painted a picture of a renewed city centre after the trauma of recession - and a rising tide that would lift the boats of the city’s musical waters, from nearby pubs and venues, to better opportunities for local artists to benefit from bigger crowds, or possible secondary spaces in a wider complex of facilities and rooms attached to the Beamish and Crawford site.
What we have, nearly eight years later, is more promises of work getting underway this year, questions of another injection of taxpayer money, and a city-central site that looks increasingly unlikely to ever match the splendour of the shiny renders that hailed the project’s existence. The wider damage, however, runs slightly deeper, affecting the city on experiential and cultural levels.
The Sullivan’s Quay building that housed arts collective Sample Studios was knocked in favour of a promised car park and hotel to help service the immediate vicinity of the proposed Centre - instead, it made for quite a visible pile of rubble in a high-traffic area visible to tourists for a number of years, and presently, another empty lot. Meanwhile, the temporary opening of the redeveloped Beamish & Crawford building itself, demonstrating its potential as a civic good by letting the people onto its plaza, and into a series of exhibitions and stalls, was merely a tease despite some stellar potential, with developers not planning to host any further events, in favour of ploughing ahead with selling office space in the era of working from home.
The ongoing changes to the city have also had knock-on effects on long-running Aiken Promotions series Live at the Marquee, with its longtime Monahan Road plot earmarked for building and development, as part of a generational plan to expand the city centre into the docklands, including the promising new phase of the Marina Park project. The summer series will stay in relative situ - across the road at the former Tedcastle Oil site on Monahan Road, boasting expanded capacity, parking and facilities in its 19th year - but with an initial announcement of acts comprised entirely of veteran Marquee regulars, the question of how it will expand on its loyal crowd, and feature new artists and musical movements, remains to be seen.
Over in Musgrave Park, the success of Cork-born popstar Cian Ducrot’s maiden big-gig voyage, sold to the rafters ahead of next June, speaks to how other Leeside artists could be given the opportunity to expand their hometown audiences to a consistent bottom line, before setting off elsewhere to do their early-career “underplay tour” rounds, furthering the wider appreciation of the talent and creativity on our doorsteps.
Meanwhile, a bigger play is being made by MCD for the casual punter, including Take That’s Leeside debut, and a Sting/Blondie double-bill, throughout the summer season. Another event with MCD connections is Mitchelstown’s Indiependence festival, taking a break in 2024 after a busy crisis-era period, outlining a view to a 2025 return in its social-media statement on the matter. It seems to have been a period of near-oversaturation in terms of summer weekend festivals the past few years - and pausing to consider what the format, demographics, and layout look like in the continuing long-term seems like a shrewd move at present.
