Weekend music festivals: 10 to catch at Indiependence and All Together Now
Nick Cave, Fatboy Slim, Self Esteem and many more great performers will take to the stage across a busy weekend of Irish festivals.
The late career of Nick Cave has yielded one masterpiece after another. In 2019, he released the magisterial Ghosteen — an exploration of grief recorded in the aftermath of the death of his son, Arthur at age 14. And in 2021 he and his long-time Bad Seeds foil Warren Ellis have put out Carnage, a brooding, buffeting piece assembled during lockdown.
Music aside, it has been a tough several years for Cave, whose oldest child, Jethro, died at 31 in May. Fans will wish him the best as he returns to live performance. All Together Now meanwhile follows a rather surreal intervention by Cave in the latest season of Love Island, when he revealed that the parents of contestant Luca Bish helped him through his grief.
Electronica and jazz collide rhapsodically in the music of Sam Shepherd, a composer with a background in neuroscience and a talent for balmy dance-floor noodling. He released one of 2021’s outstanding records with Promises, a collaboration with jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. Pop and jazz collided in ways that were both intriguing and also oddly, massively comforting.
Having recently headlined Dublin’s National Concert Hall, Wainwright makes up for lost time with another Irish concert. He’ll be playing material from across the span of his career — but fans will be delighted to hear that recent sets have included songs from his excellent 2020 album, Unfollow The Rules — a suite of torch songs that finds Wainwright contemplating life and its many challenges from the vantage point of his late 40s. It features one of his darkest compositions yet, the powerful Early Morning Madness. He’s also been delivering a devastating version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, from his Judy Garland tribute, Rufus Does Judy At Capitol Studios.
As one half of Slow Club — aka Daniel Radcliffe’s favourite band — Rebeca Lucy Taylor seemed fated to a life of indie obscurity. But with the new project Self Esteem, she has reinvented herself as a bringer of big pop moments, with her second LP, 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure, acclaimed by the NME as “assured, unapologetic and charged with a dark, smirking wit”.
Pronounced “Dive”, this Brooklyn band is a vehicle for Zachary Cole Smith, a psychedelic rocker whose work blends Joy Division, The Strokes and Seventies krautrock. Originally named after the Nirvana song Dive, the group are marking the tenth anniversary of their debut Oshin. They will also be playing material from 2019’s Deceiver, which chronicled Smith’s long quest to overcome drug addiction and achieve sobriety.
Rival Consoles: London producer Ryan Lee West makes textured ambient music shot through with humanity, angst and occasionally a hint of menace. There are reflections of Aphex Twin and Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, though West takes care to layer his music with a powerful vulnerability. He creates, in other words, electronica with a big, beating digital heart.
Critics used to love to beat up on the Coldplay-go-techno sound of Dan Smith’s band. But a decade on from their first hit, Pompeii, who is chortling now? Bastille came roaring back earlier this year with Give Me The Future, a rumination on fake news and the corrosive effect of technology. Above all, though, “Our phones, for example, they're amazing,” he told the earlier this year. “They can completely connect you with everybody. They are books, they are music, they are your link to the world. They can have all the research under the sun. It’s incredible. But they can also be toxic and addictive. And divisive."
Twenty-five years ago, Norman Cook was one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, thanks to hits such as Praise You and Right Here, Right Now. He’s stopped recording new music— but as a DJ and conjurer of party vibes, is still at the very zenith of his abilities.
“I remember doing the interviews at the time and saying, ‘I don’t expect this music to be played in 10 years' time. This is the sound of now’,” he revealed in a recent interview with the “And I remember getting told off for it: ‘don’t undersell yourself — this music isn’t disposable’. You never dream you’ll be anything more than something people dance to — a soundtrack to a Saturday night out.”
She’s collaborated with David Guetta and in 2019 achieved the distinction of becoming the second most streamed British artist on Spotify. Hill’s speciality is escapist pop built around her expressively husky voice. Released last autumn, her debut album, Only Honest On The Weekend reached seven on the UK charts. She also enjoys playing Ireland, saying “I love the Irish, they’re one of the friendliest people around”. At Indiependence, expect the feeling to be mutual.
Indie pop with hints of Irish singer-songwriter earnestness and small-town anguish. All courtesy of Westmeath’s most celebrated musical exports this side of Niall Horan and Joe Dolan.
A Cork singer whose music lives in a thrilling place between Florence and the Machine and Enya, though with a zinging pop quality all of its own. And if ethereal, she is also grounded in reality and her lived experiences. “I have to write about things that happened to me and that mean something to me,” she once told the . “I can go back to the situation and relive it and write about it. I find it harder to write about about things that haven’t happened.”
Sophie Doyle Ryder: The Malahide singer namechecks Ariana Grande and Anne Marie as influences, though her music is also shot through with a Celtic ennui. She is signed to the same management agency as Billie Eilish.
