What a year: Joe Duffy, Panti Bliss, Tolü Makay and others pick their highlights
Like everybody, the internet has destroyed my ability to concentrate. I’m constantly dipping in and out of Imelda May’s poetry book A Lick and a Prayer. You can see she’s a lyricist. They’re lovely thoughtful, sometimes profound, sometimes light poems.
I’m obsessed with Succession. The writing is so sharp and quietly hilarious. I love all the characters even though they’re all hateful. Everyone single one of the actors are perfectly cast. The one I’m rooting for changes from week to week.
I enjoyed The Green Knight. It’s kind of a King Arthur vibe. It stars Dev Patel. It looks beautiful. It’s fun. It has enough action as well as big ideas. Myself and my fella were discussing it afterwards trying to work it out.
Mark O’Halloran’s Conversations After Sex at the Project Arts Centre gets my vote. It was fabulous, funny and moving. Powerhouse performances by the two lead actors: Kate Stanley Brennan and Fionn Ó Loingsigh.
I love the American rapper Lil Nas X’s album Montero. He’s fun to watch, a little marketing genius. He’s queering up the mainstream, especially black hip hop culture.
concluding Tuesday, December 21
Zoe Holohan’s As the Smoke Clears is her own true story about the Greek wildfires in 2018. Her husband was killed. They were on their honeymoon. It’s an incredible story. It’s a reaffirmation that some stories can only be told properly in books.
My favourite comedy is Veep. I’m just watching it. It’s from the same people that gave us The Thick of It. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is brilliant. It’s the funniest thing on telly for me at the minute.
A film I loved watching this year – although it came out a while back, but is available on platforms – is Yesterday. It’s by Danny Boyle. It’s the most incredible premise: there’s an electrical outage, and everyone in the world, bar this one busker, doesn’t know anything about the Beatles. He’s onto a winner.
I saw the prolific Peter Sheridan’s new play Philo & Me in The Viking Theatre. It’s about a young nun and a woman who comes to visit her and the relationship between the two of them. It’s hilarious.
The best exhibition of the year, Rembrandt in Print, is at Cork’s Crawford Gallery. It runs until January. It’s stunning, beautifully presented and free.
Bob Mortimer’s autobiography And Away…. If you haven’t seen his spellbinding flights of fancy on Would I Lie to You? on BBC, get on YouTube immediately. There is huge skill, boundless imagination and an almost childlike joy in all his episodes and his book is the same.
The characters in Succession are all immensely unlikeable but the dialogue and performances are so good you get on board. Now I’m as addicted to its modern Shakespearean drama as anyone.
Bo Burnham: Inside. Bo reminds me of the Flight of the Conchords in that the stand up and songs are both so good they could stand alone.
The Spiegeltent Festival in Wexford, epic venue, lovely town.
I’m sure some go high-brow, something involving the words “a reimagining”, but honestly my culture highlight was watching a young, confident Offaly team win their first U20 football All-Ireland since 1988.
Andrea Mara’s All Her Fault has the best opening of a book I’ve ever read. A Dublin mum goes to pick up her son from his first playdate. An old woman answers the door and says no children live at that address. The mum double checks the address texted to her. It’s correct. Her son is missing. I couldn’t put it down.
I’m obsessed with Lego Masters. I’ve watched every episode of the UK, Australian and US series. It’s basically GBBO but with Lego instead of baking. I find myself gasping and holding my head when people’s builds come crashing down. The drama is unparalleled.
I enjoyed The Courier. Jessie Buckley was great but Benedict Cumberbatch stole the show with his portrayal of a put-upon British businessman coerced into becoming a spy in Russia. Nail-biting stuff.
Since Adele released 30, I haven’t stopped playing it. The album release synchronised perfectly with my hormonal cycle so I was able to get super emotional on first listen which was a bonus. (Half joking.)
I saw Jody O Neill’s What I (Don’t) Know about Autism in the Peacock Theatre. There is a musical number in it that charts a brief history of autism and I haven’t laughed so much while learning so much since Sesame Street. A glorious piece of work.
Maureen Gaffney’s Your One Wild and Precious Life is my new manual for life. It’s the ticket. She’s such a wise woman. You never stop growing. You’re a work in progress. We’re not defined as much by our age as we used to be. Everybody should have this book.
I have a little Netflix watchers group with Brian Kennedy and Hazel O’Connor. We tell each other what we’re watching – all thrash – and we text each other about it. We loved Good Girls. Christina Hendricks is in it. It’s great.
I went to see No Time to Die at the cinema. I have a softness for James Bond. I cried my eyes out. I didn’t want to leave the cinema. I hadn’t been to the cinema in so long and it was a blockbuster movie. I have so many memories around first nights of James Bond.
My personal favourite was me! I played at the Cork Opera House with a concert orchestra. I could never have believed it. It was tremendous. Áine Delaney did all the arrangements for seven of my songs. I was chuffed.
Home, Ireland’s answer to the Magdalene laundries at the Abbey Theatre, was incredible. It was all women reading out testimonies from women who had been in institutions. It was so powerful.
The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi. Set in Italy, it’s a novel about a man whose life has slipped away from him. His love for a woman who’s not his wife has paralysed him. It’s inventive, a beautiful, complex book.
Call My Agent is superb. It’s set in Paris about a group of people who work for a film and literary agency. It’s about the conniving, rivalry, friendship and love between agents and their clients. They bring in actual film stars like Juliette Binoche and Catherine Deneuve.
The Life Ahead stars Sophia Loren. Her son directed it. Set in Bari on the southern tip of Italy, it’s about the relationship between a former prostitute and a Senegalese immigrant boy. It’s a great story and two stunning performances.
I’m listening to a lot of Lisa O’Neill. Her version of The Lass of Aughrim, which is the famous James Joyce song sung at the party in his story The Dead, is beautiful. She has a haunting voice.
The 2021 Cork International Poetry Festival was run online. It was a who’s who of poets: Rita Ann Higgins, Martín Espada, Victoria Kennefick, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ben Okri, Mary O’Donnell.
I’ve got James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake on my breakfast table. When I get up in the morning I read bits of it. None of it makes any sense but it’s the dismantling of English that is good for my head. It cracks reality. I love that you can decipher it to a point and look online about meanings.
I watched Raised by Wolves this year, a series by Ridley Scott, in one day. One of those marathons. Rarely I’d do that. It’s set in the future where robots go rogue. A lot of sci-fi has become reality so it’s very interesting.
I saw Dune and I thought: wow, that’s a step up in epic, sci-fi movies in terms of special effects. It’s a great story, too. It looks like Lawrence of Arabia in space – it has that enormous David Lean look about it.
Lord Huron is a band I’m enjoying. It’s bizarre – you discover music these days on, like, little Instagram clips. You go then and hunt down what the song is, what the band is. I discovered that band who are based in LA and thought they’re really good.
I did the Royal Albert Hall with Jools Holland in November. Having done it a few times before, I finally got to enjoy it rather than being intimidated by it. Playing it is mind-blowing: it’s so beautiful to look at and it has so much history.
Monolithic Undertow by Harry Sword traces the history of the drone in music, from ancient cultures in Morocco and India through to 1960s psychedelia and contemporary electronica. It’s a trip, and you’ll discover lots of new music along the way.
Tracing the labyrinthine turf wars and shifting allegiances of the Naples narco trade, Gomorrah is the most bingeable show alive; four seasons are available for the uninitiated.
I love soundtracks, especially to write to, and Jonny Greenwood’s score for the new Jane Campion movie, The Power of The Dog, is a beautiful piece of work, remodelling classic Western motifs in fabulous new ways.
Speaking of Westerns, the new Kelly Reichardt movie First Cow is a beguilingly strange take on the genre, focusing on the introduction of French pastries to 1820s Oregon. Delicious stuff. Stream on MUBI.
I have zero shame, so I’m going to mention my own play Autumn Royal, which is set on top of Richmond Hill in Cork and was recently produced by the Irish Rep company in New York, with Maeve Higgins and John Keating turning in brilliant performances. Stream now on Irishrep.org!
Trouble by the comedian Marise Gaughan (which will be released early next year). Her writing is so bold and brave. She’s lived a crazy life for a 29-year-old: drugs, exploring with older men, with women. She ended up in a psych ward, hit rock bottom, but has come out the other side.
Kin because of its diversity on screen for an RTÉ production, giving a representation of Ireland we haven’t had before. Clare Dunne stands alone. She’s stunning. The writer Peter McKenna did a beautiful job.
Deadly Cuts directed by Rachel Carey, with Angeline Ball as one of the four female leads. Because it’s working class, the dialogue is witty – I fell around the place laughing. It’s brilliant.
Kate Brennan and Fionn Ó Loingsigh in Conversations After Sex were phenomenal. It’s about somebody going through loss, a relationship breakup, who’s abusing her body by handing it over to men and feeling the aftermath of it. There are home truths and discovery in it. It's superb.
Mother Bloc Party in September at Collins Barracks in Dublin. You had Elaine Mai, Denise Chaila, Panti Bliss. There was glitter, dancing, dressing up. Everyone was just smiling.
The edited collection A Shared Struggle: Stories of Palestinian and Irish Hunger Strikers is a tough but important read that rightly portrays the Palestinian people's resistance as anti-colonial. It helps challenge the international community’s acceptance or support of Israel's violations.
Succession is funnier than most sitcoms. And what with the hubris, the drink and drug abuse, and the cringeworthy humour, I basically am Kendall; perhaps, with ever so slightly less cash.
I can’t believe I’m about to give another Dub a bit of credit but Kojaque – and his album Town’s Dead – is smart and disgustingly talented.
The first thing I saw after the world opened back up again was Seamus O’Rourke at Ballydehob’s Fit-Up Festival performing his own work, Indigestion. It was awful: awful for me because he was absolutely sensational and I’d to go on after him.
Even watching via stream as opposed to live in the theatre, Clare Monnelly is a precise, authentic and hypnotic performer in her one-woman show Charlie's a Cepto. Go see it.
I’m a great admirer of Colson Whitehead. His novel Harlem Shuffle is set around the early 1960s when all the heavy lifting for Black American civil rights was done. At first glance, all the characters can seem stereotypical but they’re fleshed out. None of them are merely cyphers for an ideology or ideas of social justice. It’s a very human story.
I’m a latecomer to Peaky Blinders. It’s excellent. Great story, great execution, great cast. The character of the late Helen McCrory was fabulous. The world of travellers and their connection with horseracing is fascinating. My first paid job was as a bookie’s runner back in the days of illegal off-track betting.
Green Book is about a slightly racist Italian-American guy who’s a driver for a black concert pianist. It’s set in the time of the Jim Crow laws. It’s a must-see movie.
I’ve just acquired a double album Sons of Rogues. It’s sea shanties sung by unlikely people: Beth Orton, Iggy Pop, Robyn Hitchcock, Sean Lennon. Some of it isn’t suitable for female company, but I’m a sucker for a sea shanty – I come from an island race.
Sleaford Mods at Latitude. They’re very obscene, from England’s north midlands. I’m not a badge wearer but one day I’m gonna wear one with one of their tune titles: Jolly Fucker.
Professional Troublemaker by Nigerian American Luvvie Ajayi Jones is about the importance of having people around you in life to support you, especially when you’re venturing into something that might pop off and make you successful.
The South Korean series Squid Game is about gambling addiction and how it destroys people’s lives. It's told through a game with over 400 players. Only one person can win the total sum of money. It’s a huge highlight of the year for lots of people.
I’ve been telling everybody about The Last Duel. It’s about a fourteenth-century woman and her rape case. The movie shows three different points of views: her perspective, her husband’s and the rapist’s. It’s an important watch, an incredible movie.
The artist I loved this year was Little Simz, a British-Nigerian rapper. Her album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, her life, her story hit home. I’m into her big, operatic sounds. She’s become a huge inspiration.
I got to sell out The Tolü Makay Experience at Dublin’s Vicar St, Cork and Galway. That was amazing. The people who came to the show were different ages, from 17 to about 60, different ethnicities, genders – a real blend, which I don’t really see at other gigs I go to. Also seeing people cry was nice!
Snowflake by Louise Nealon blew me away. I couldn’t shut up about it and had everyone from friends to my mother reading it. Five lines in I was guffawing with laughter and it also hit me in the heart. Everyone’s getting it for Christmas.
There’s one show I continually turn to when I’m in need of a boost: Taskmaster. The hosts Greg Davies and Alex Horne always bring out the best, bizarre and bonkers in the contestants; it is an utter joy.
Herself is a film co-written and starring Claire Dunne about a mother escaping domestic abuse who finds herself homeless but, with the help of the community, her fortunes look to be taking a turn. The story is based on real-life circumstances. It’s acted to perfection with a story that will break and heal you at the same time.
My favourite piece of music is also a television extravaganza: Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back about the making of their last album is beautiful. I’d watch the Fab Four drinking tea for hours. Seeing how Paul McCartney came up with Get Back in a few minutes is awesome.
With lockdown, I haven’t been anywhere but did I manage to go to a nightclub for a proper night before they were shut down again. It was glorious.
