Citrus’ Sour Fruits: New Cork promoters bringing Irish hip-hop appeal to An Spailpín Fánach

Things tend to happen in fits and starts in Cork music. Crowds for certain genres come and go, while devotees keep ‘er lit in the city’s small venues, in between visits from national and international names at the bigger rooms.

In the meantime, new heads enter the picture with new ideas, new visions, possibly some naiveté, but the kind of seemingly boundless enthusiasm that comes from surveying the scene and figuring out where to muck in. Ever is the cycle of DIY music in any city, but ever also is the joy of seeing it all happen.

Cork hip-hop’s newest promotions house, Citrus, led by Macroom-hailing promoter Bridget Flynn, announced its presence over social media in the past few months with word of its debut event, ‘Sour Fruits’.

Slowly unveiling its lineup over the course of a number of social media posts, the group announced the presence of Dublin wordsmith Curtisy, Limerick rapper Citrus Fresh (no relation), Clare singer DeCarteret, Leeside DJ extraordinaire JusMe and Cork beatmaker/rapper JarJarJr — giving each a corresponding cartoon mascot to represent them on posters, flyers, etc.

On the phone, Flynn discusses what motivated her to get involved with gigs in the city: “I worked in The Briery Gap [theatre], when I was younger, in Macroom for years, so I’ve always been interested in, like, the back end of venues and theatres.

“I’m a really big music lover, and I go to a lot of [hip-hop] events and gigs up in Dublin. I know a lot of musicians, and I suppose when it came to setting up Citrus, a lot of it happens in Dublin.

“I suppose when we were setting it up, it was really about the price of tickets for me. If I want to go see someone, yes, tickets might be 10, 15 euro at the door in Dublin, but if you’re coming from Cork, it takes quite a lot of money, if you’re getting a train, if you have to stay the night. I want to be able to try and bring a pocket of that back into Cork city.”

Taking that vision of creating spaces for hip-hop in the city — pursued in their turn by Stevie G and countless co-conspirators, the LiveStyles events, The Hobo Convention, and most recently, the Cuttin’ Heads Collective — and bringing it to stakeholders like venues and talent after the uncertainty of the past few years, was a task tackled with an aplomb that’s impressed a lot of people.

“I wanted our first event to have a very easy, breezy underground sort of vibe. The Spailpín were so accommodating towards us, you really kind of have your own way inside there. Everyone that I asked, y’know, especially Curtisy, coming from Dublin, and Citrus Fresh coming from Limerick, like, they were more than delighted to come down.

“Just being ahead of the game and being able to get them booked in before festival season was the main thing, but everyone is also willing to play in Cork, like, they want that Cork listenership, and it is there.”

“Yeah, the lineup’s incredible,” says legendary Leeside DJ JusMe, a man who’s seen his share of change in the city’s hip-hop community in a body of work spanning over two decades, including facilitation and promotion as part of the much-missed Cuttin’ Heads.

“I’m glad to see someone doing these kinds of hip-hop events. I’ve stepped back from that, for the most part. So yeah, I’m glad that Bridget’s stepped in to fill that space, put her twist on it. The lineup’s incredible — Curtisy, an amazing rapper; Citrus Fresh, we’ve had in Cork several times, an incredible rapper.”

“It’s the best promo’d gig I’ve seen in a long time,” says Curtisy, set to make his Leeside debut at the event. “The colours, all the posts, every day. I love being a little fruit in the posters. What did they make me again… a grape, a couple of grapes? I’m loving it, it feels fun. It feels like everybody’s excited for it, just as much as I am, which is not always the case.”

Currently riding a wave of momentum in Irish hip-hop, Curtisy’s debut LP ‘ What Was The Question’ is a mission statement of hazy production and semi-wholesome bars delivered with wit, and an at-times deceptive nimbleness, that puts the twist in an otherwise easy-going style that’s endeared him to many.

“I’m feeling absolutely overwhelming love,” he says of the response to the record. “I feel like it’s probably the first time in life where I’ve put, like, a long amount of effort and time into something, for it to have paid off, or to even be completed. So I definitely feel good, I’m excited because I can see the potential now, you get me?

“I’d been saving songs over the last two years, and just trying to build on the ones I already had. It got to a point where there were like five or six songs, and I thought, ‘great, everything I do now and in future has to be for this, just to get to ten or twelve songs’.

“Yeah, it’s been fun. I’m making friendships with a lot of people who are just incredible, and do what they do, just way better than me. I’m just learning.

“It’s been a great experience. It’s been an eye opening experience — fulfilling.”

Also on the lineup is Leeside beatmaker Robert O’Halloran, aka JarJarJr — at one time, toward the end of the last decade, an unlikely phenomenon of the then-nascent (and largely online) lo-fi hip-hop scene with fan videos garnering millions of views, he’s since pivoted to live performance, songwriting, and most recently, making the jump to getting behind the mic and rapping himself.

“The spiel that Bridget gave me was that she was trying to bring people to Cork that you would normally have to travel out of the county to go and see, and to provide a lovely experience for the artist as well as the punter.

“It’s obviously very eye-catching, and it’s appealing to the younger people as well as the older people. It seems to be a fresh approach to things. There’s people that are being brought to Cork that want to come to work, and people want to see them in Cork — there’s a disconnect there and Citrus is filling that gap.”

O’Halloran will be performing new tunes from his upcoming debut album ‘Catch the Dusk’, releasing this August, an effort that sees profound changes in his style come to fruition, as he transitions from beatmaker to rapper and musical director.

“I had done a recording session with a band called Masexodus, that [Dublin jazz guitarist] Max Zaska was heading up together with Mark Murphy. I had done a recording session with them, and I did feel a bit out of my depth because they were all fantastic players and I was just coming at it from a beat-making perspective. I was on keyboard duties and I met Dylan Lynch, the drummer from a band called Soda Blonde.

“The first thing I did was I got Dylan Lynch in the studio to re-record the drums that I created for some songs over lockdown. That put in me this desire to have everything played by real people. They were all original songs already, there was no samples or anything like that. It was my first time venturing into songwriting, and I got a taste for what things could sound like if it was played by a talented musician, and I fell head over heels with it.

“I was always kind of searching for a way to perform live that wasn’t a beat. I never felt like I was busy enough, standing in front of all those people. I wanted to be doing something else. I tried playing piano live over beats, stuff like that, and that was a bit too complicated for me.

“I’m not the greatest singer in the world, so the rapping was a means for me to perform.”

With tickets moving for Sour Fruits, and another gig announced for the summer at Ballycotton’s Sea Church venue this summer, it’s an exciting time for Flynn and company to be getting the ball rolling — she talks about her expectations for the Citrus project.

“My goal is that we can benefit artists and venues, that we can come together, really move on and move forward and grow in the music scene in Cork... there’s so much we can do with it.”

• Citrus presents ‘Sour Fruits’ upstairs at An Spailpín Fánach, South Main Street, on Friday, May 24. Doors 9pm, tickets €22 from www.eventbrite.ie. Follow Citrus on Instagram: @citruscork.
• Curtisy’s debut album ‘What Was the Question’ is available for digital download and mail order on 12” vinyl from https://curtisy.bandcamp.com/album/what-was-the-question, and is available on all digital streaming services.