A decade with Downtown: Thoughts on ten years of Echo music journalism

A decade ago this past summer, a younger self of your writer’s was sending béal bocht emails around to the “established” media’s arts and music pages, in the nearly entirely-vain hopes that his ‘outstanding new-media resumé’ alone (in reality, a few years of blogging and freelance writing, alongside struggling with promoting live gigs in a deeply post-recessionary Cork) would land him a staff media job somewhere.

Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that someone was needed to talk to then-Rubberbandit Blindboy Boatclub at an hour’s notice – and that the now-podcaster was so very generous with his A-material of road stories, celebrity encounters, the relationship between Cork and Limerick, and a book he was working on at the time – your writer might not even be on these pages today.

Between half-remembered forks in the road and the present day, passing the 10-year milestone this past summer seems like a good time to stop and have a think – about what’s gone on in our city’s musical and cultural scenes since the summer of 2015, where we all are presently, and what the faint laughter of an ever-nebulous future might sound like, as it resonates against our perspectives and expectations.

Music Media 

While the once-established way of doing things in music media was already in the midst of profound change in 2015, how music discourse and wider word-spreading happens is even more fragmented than we might have imagined a decade ago.

Social media is obviously the big culprit, as music journos continue to wrestle with the balance between storytelling and the various metrics of engagement that have replaced relatively steady measures like paid readerships, etc.; and in its turn, phenomena like a brief turn to personality-led video content and podcasts like the Nialler9 Podcast and The Point of Everything.

With that being said, social media fatigue is obviously a major motivating factor for further changes in niche journalism – newsletters provide scribes like The G-Man or Banjaxed Media with ways of reaching engaged readers directly, recalling some of that early-internet magic; while internet radio stations like Cork’s Éist have become important vectors of human-led curation and discovery in an age of streaming and faceless algorithms.

The Music Itself

By 2015, Cork itself was emerging from the local impacts of the broader economic crisis of the preceding years, and in its rear-view mirror were a number of small scenes and circles of creators, promoters, DJs, etc. that had kept the lights on for their respective genres in the city.

The city has historically held threads of music history across rock, electronic and folk; not to mention outlier communities in the realms of hip-hop, ambient, metal and the avant-garde; and as the streaming-era dissolution of cultural boundaries continued on a wider scale, so too did the ongoing story of makers and doers in Cork helping and facilitating each other across various old lines.

In terms of rock ‘n’ roll, perhaps no better example exists than The Altered Hours, whose early freak-folk had given way to shoegazey introspection and outright psychedelia by 2016’s ‘ In Heat/Not Sorry’ album, a prelude to waves of post-punk precision, cinematic psych-rock excursions and the battle-tested reverb of the band’s self-titled third LP, due out this month.

Across hip-hop and electronics, examples of collaboration and community have ranged from the much-missed Cuttin’ Heads crew that took the laying of a foundation for beatsy business in the city as its mission, to the Electronic Music Council’s civil-society advocacy for club culture, DJs and producers alike.

The Places It Happens 

Culture has never developed, or been accelerated, on daytime radio, or in big-arena settings. For as many people as there are who performatively moan online about ‘Irish culture’ and the like, you’d seldom see their likes at the grassroots of a scene, in their communities, or being part of something bigger than themselves. Cork has seemingly been in a venue crisis for as long as many of us reading can remember, but that’s made the strongholds, sibíns and outliers that have opened their doors even more important.

From the brighter lights of Cyprus Avenue, the Opera House, Live at St Luke’s and various big festivals around the city, to pillars of musical intrepidity like The Roundy, Coughlan’s, Fred Zeppelin’s, PLUGD Records’ current quayside home opposite outdoor venue TEST SITE, and latterly the likes of Nudes/Dali and Maureen’s, there is, and remains, a plurality of spaces and places.

The city is still stuck for venues to fill the gaps between 80-100 and 500 people, mind; as well as the gaps between 500 and 1000 standing that makes the like of the Opera House such risky business for local acts that are possibly on the precipice of bigger things, while civic spaces like our parks and the Triskel Arts Centre still have much to do in terms of community accessibility.

Oh, and that events centre might be nice, eventually. If it exists.

The City We Live In

Cork, like any city, is always changing; and perhaps we as individuals, groups of pals, small scenes, get a bit lost in our respective moments sometimes to properly appreciate that fact. We’re a port town, a university town, and, housing crisis notwithstanding, a town with a wide and ever-expanding spread of suburbia, for waves of once-and-former participants in a scene to fade out to after the love is gone, or responsibility comes calling.

Whole waves of people age into, out of, and sometimes even back into making music seriously – looking at ye, Big Boy Foolish, Flywheel, etc! – while leaving a legacy for their successors, such as punk bands like Pretty Happy and I Dreamed I Dream, opting, in a nigh-on decolonial manner, to look to their backyard and its manifold wonders for inspiration, rather than further afield.

Meanwhile, people from around the world come to Cork, whether fleeing war and famine, or to work in the multi-national sector that’s made a home in Ireland, bringing their influences, stories and inspirations with them.

Outsider Ent, a group of rappers, musicians, producers, designers and other creatives, have been perhaps the foremost example of people in my memory of people coming together from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, taking the experience of living in Cork as its creative fulcrum, as per member Kestine’s ‘Tales of a Black Irish’ single a few years back.

The World We're In

It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the state of the world now, especially with the seemingly lightning-fast pace at which we’ve collectively arrived here, and Cork, much like any city, town, or village, could easily take itself as a microcosm for those changes. Capitalism and the neoliberal economic order have been seen to be cyclical, cynical things that take human beings as mere units of economic productivity to be exploited, data-mined, surveilled, and sold to on a near-constant basis via any available means of reaching people. People want out, want something new.

The world is burning; there are genocides and famines happening; the Western powers at either side of us seem hell-bent on careening into fascism to keep their respective projects afloat; and their various flying monkeys are similarly devoted to moving the blame for a dissolution of rights and standards to ever-more marginalised outgroups, such as trans people, the disabled and racial minorities.

Your writer never thought, even in his wildest dreams in 2015, that local arts and cultural communities, initiatives and scenes would have to act as de facto pillars of organisation and mobilisation against a rising tide of intolerance, fear, violence and ignorance, an element of which is sadly increasingly visible in our own city – even more tragic when you consider our shared history of rebellion, sacrifice, valour and safe harbour.

But that’s where we are. And thankfully, that’s one of the levers available to us…

The Arts As A Home

There are things I’d like to be able to say here, injustices I’d love to right, and various actors that have come and gone over the years that I’d only love to name-and-shame, personally, were it not for the proliferation of defamation law in the prevailing climate for media organisations across the board. So I’ll simply say this…

The arts are, ultimately, a home. Each of us finds our ways to our artistic interests, callings and vocations via the factors that influence our lives – from social class and correspondent financial comfort; to race, ethnicity and cultural background; to sexuality and gender identity; to disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, etc.

Each of us has found that way in life, our communities, and our purposes as our lives have gone by, in the arts and culture. Each of us has a responsibility, then, to use our gathered empathy, experiences, and intuitions, to be sound to one another, protect one another, hold space for each other, listen, and demonstrate shared values of community, solidarity and connection. And that simply cannot happen when we’re accepting of, or excusing for, exclusion or discrimination, poor treatment of others, or the leveraging of one’s personal social capital and goodwill for ends that seek to enable these things.

So… f**kin’ be sound, is what I’m saying here, I suppose.

What It's All About

Though the times have changed, and the ways in which we each consume our media have similarly diverged, the fact is that tens of thousands of people, in Cork and beyond, let the Echo’s print editions and EchoLive.ie into their homes, shops, libraries, reception desks, canteens, scrapbooks and smart devices every day, as they have done for over 120 years at this stage.

Whether it’s been keeping the shoulder to the wheel of previews, press-days and coverage around festival seasons; or seeking to dive deep into the lives, motivations and creativity of the bold and brave artists and facilitators, in bedrooms and practice spaces around the city and its growing diasporic footprint; it’s been a privilege to be part of it.

Each of us writing in these pages owes a debt of gratitude to the people and communities that continue to accord us a place in their lives that we should never take for granted – your scribe, for one, intends to always be mindful of that relationship, and thanks everyone that’s read a piece, shared it out, sat down to be interviewed, taken a call, or otherwise supported us.

• Mike McGrath-Bryan is a regular music journalist at The Echo, as well as a staff digital journalist at the Irish Examiner, and a freelance music writer for independent music service Bandcamp. He also creates radio for Cork-based Éist and RTÉ 2XM; and has most recently been published in New Island’s anthology of adult-autistic non-fiction, ‘Wired Our Own Way’.
• He would very much like to thank Downtown’s longtime editor, Eoghan Dinan, for his patience with a decade of panicked, Tuesday-night filings, and his continued flexibility with the very existence of the term ‘wordcount’. Nice one, boss.