Live music in Cork thriving, but what now for city's events centre?
Cork singer AbbieLee on stage in Cyprus Avenue with Kerri Chandler.
Festival line-ups are being announced and the summer schedule is filling up but our grassroots music scene is a 12-months-a-year thing and thankfully there’s a lot of activity.
As always, I’m gonna mention that our gig and music infrastructure isn’t ideal, but out of necessity sometimes comes creativity, and there are plenty of people getting creative in putting on shows right now.
When it comes to big venues, Cork is a bit limited and, notoriously, we are as far away as ever from having our long-awaited events centre. With one of the government ministers most linked to it, Simon Coveney, now gone, you’d be forgiven for giving up on this dream. It certainly doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen anytime soon.
The summer will bring temporary solace with big shows at Virgin Media Park and the newly relocated Marquee, who have recently added Ne-Yo to their line-up.
The City Hall and the Cork Opera House remain sporadic options due to their other priorities, so our main hope for bigger shows lies in Cyprus Avenue, which is steadily booked throughout the year and continues to offer loads of live and club gigs. I attended a lunchtime showcase by the UCC live music society last week, where a bunch of upcoming local bands auditioned for some A&R record company visitors from Warners UK. The standard was high and local acts such as The Cliffords, Mirrors, PebbleDash, Iris, Kane’s Basement and many more impressed.
I also attended a wonderful Kerri Chandler Cyprus Avenue show where he was ably supported by Cork acts Boolaboom and AbbieLee, both of whom showed the diversity and strength of our domestic music scene. Cyprus Avenue is a wonderfully equipped venue where the sound and lights are top notch for such gigs and it’s hard to imagine Cork without it right now.
Elsewhere there are multiple regular haunts holding it down for our music scene. The Crane Lane, Fred Zeppelins and many more venues hold shows pretty much daily, while the Spailpín Fánach does both live shows and also provides an outlet for many of the underground DJ shows that can’t be hosted elsewhere. Special mention goes to the newly reinvigorated Kino which has been hosting a wide variety of shows and events from a whole host of promoters in the last few months. Dali, who have a good track record of running electronic events, are operating upstairs in the former Larry Tompkins bar and, again, they are pushing everything from drum ’n’ bass to techno.
They previously operated out of the Pav, which is more of a late bar these days on both floors, but there’s some impressive club nights running there too. The upstairs remains one of the city’s most aesthetically pleasing venues. We thankfully still have the Bodega, The Roundy and many other long running venues too, and others, such as the Rising Sons, which can provide some of the DJ nights with an alternative venue.
The electronic music scene is vibrant and DJs are using the Liberty, The Roundy, O’Sho, Aye, The Vic, the Bru and the Edison to put on a massive variety of nights in 2024. Innovative venue and promoter tie-ups bring the likes of Sonflour, Plug’d and other spots into play too, so while on the surface things may not look amazing, if you dig deep, there’s tons of stuff on at the moment.
After multiple attempts to get something decent running regularly in a nightclub, I’ve decided to go back to my own roots and start something more lowkey and grassroots at O’Sho every Thursday, where I’ll be joined by special guests.
Another party I was privileged to play at recently took place on Cork Harbour Cruises with The Good Room, and it’s great when promoters use innovative options to breathe life into our music scene. They also hosted shows in Spike Island last year and regularly run gigs in Live at St Luke’s.
We definitely punch above our weight in Cork when it comes to bands and DJs and we have plenty of promoters willing to take risks too, so let’s see what happens for the rest of 2024!
