Special concert remembering Talos to take place in Cork 

Opening Sounds from a Safe Harbour 2025, on Thursday, September 11, will be a special concert at Cork Opera House, as the friends, collaborators and peers of late musician and songwriter Eoin French, aka Talos, will perform songs from his discography - as well as collecting for Marymount Hospice, following his passing in August of 2024.

French’s music and memory has become inextricable from the festival, thanks in no small part to his residency with Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds during the 2023 edition, yielding collaborative song We Didn’t Know We Were Ready —which would go on to become a foundational, poignant component of the singer’s still-unfolding legacy, and the underpinning of subsequent collaborative LP A Dawning, released this past summer.

“I’m looking forward to it, of course,” says Niamh Regan of the event. “The last time I was down, I was in the room with Olafur and Eoin for the week, y’know, they were the people I was co-writing with. So, it’ll be kind of a funny one to go back again, knowing Eoin’s gone, but it’s beautiful that we’re starting off with a remembrance… there’s this sadness but, also, a beauty.”

“It’s a difficult space to jump in and out of, y’know,” confesses festival director Mary Hickson. “The reason we do [Sounds from a Safe Harbour] every other year is that for a period of time, you can “put it away”. I’ve worked in festivals for a long time, and that annual cycle, for me, feels kind of relentless and that you don’t really get some proper thinking time. Eoin was an integral part of the process [of this year’s festival]. He was, he energetically still is, one of my best friends.

“Eoin will always and forever be an essential, core part of Sounds from a Safe Harbour for now and forever. So we couldn’t go into this festival without first remembering him and, in a meaningful way, just stopping for a second to acknowledge the beauty of what he’s left behind, but also the enormous loss of him. It’s a group hug for everybody before we do the festival, musically, creatively, but also, like, every single person going to be on that stage was a part of his creative process.

“The process of putting that set list together has taken, I would say, nine months, of slow consideration. What would Eoin want? Who would he want to stand and sing that song? Who would he like that person to be accompanied by? Every single second has been carefully considered, and his musical world is going to be wrapped around this. If you’ve seen his A Dawning record, on the sleeve, he has in his handwriting, ‘in the garden, feed my ghost and let it glow’... for me, that’s an invitation for people to sing his songs, keep him alive through his music. We’re sending his energy out, y’know, and all of the love that goes with that.”