Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, Lankum... Top 10 talking points in music in 2023
Taylor Swift, The Beatles, and Lana del Rey featured among the music highlights of 2023.
It’s been a year of highs, lows and breathless suspense – and that’s just Taylor Swift fans trying to get their mitts on tickets for her Aviva Stadium gigs next summer. Elsewhere, music in 2023 was reliably chock-a-block with surprises, including out-of-the-blue new releases by The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Meanwhile, old-school Irish music has become the hot new trend among the tastemaker set and pop left rock’ n roll choking on its fumes. Read on for more.
Lana Del Rey announced her Dublin show with just a few weeks’ notice. However, there was nothing last-minute about a hauntingly brilliant concert that breathed life into her meditative new LP, Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard. Equally memorable were Paramore, again at 3Arena, in April, at which queen of emo Hayley Williams found time for a rant against Ticketmaster.
Elsewhere, Billie Eilish bravely slogged through a headliner Electric Picnic despite feeling “sick as b**ls” (her words). The year had begun theatrically with German experimental folk band Heilung’s turn at the BGE Theatre in January, where they charted a thunderous course between Enya, Metallica and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
There was a pre-Christmas miracle for Beatles fans with new music from the group, made possible with cutting-edge AI technology. Now and Then began its existence as a bittersweet John Lennon ballad recorded as a demo in the mid-1970s. But it took the magic of modern computing to allow Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr add new elements – and to incorporate George Harrison’s guitar from an earlier tilt at the song in the mid-1990s (when technical limitations had frustrated their attempts to revive the tune).
'Now and Then' was fantastic – a moving final flourish from the twilight of The Beatles’ history that will have stirred in the listener memories of their relationship with the band and that of family members, some no longer with us. However, the less said about the horrific Peter Jackson video, the better. Jackson blended new footage of Macca and Ringo with old Lennon and Harrison home videos, and the results were bone-chilling. It was the most terrifying thing the director had put on the screen since Frodo fell into that swamp in The Two Towers.
The breakthrough of neo-trad acts such as Lankum, John Francis Flynn and Ye Vagabonds (who recorded with Boygenius) has been one of the stories of 2023. Bringing together traditional and experimental influences, they have ushered Irish music into a new era – and received much praise along the way.
Lankum were nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for their fourth LP, False Lankum. Mojo heralded its “hurricane-force drama” and suggested – with a hint of hyperbole perhaps – that it was the folk equivalent of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of the Moon.
Nobody thinks of The Rolling Stones as scrappy underdogs with a point to prove. They have spent the past several decades in a state of comfortable semi-retirement – lucratively churning out their hits on stage while showing little interest in pushing forward creatively.
That all changed with the fun and frisky Hackney Diamonds – an LP that rolled back the years and proved that the Stones still have it. As ever, Jagger was the driving force. In 2022, he rang up Keith Richards and Ron Wood and set them a deadline. Cracking the whip was just what they required – forced to knuckle down, the group, still reeling from the death 12 months perilously of drummer Charlie Watts, showed that the old magic endured.
There were so many candidates for best LP of 2023, from the stadium indie of Boygenius’s The Record to Lana Del Rey’s free-floating Did You Know There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard? and Troye Sivan’s charming and playful Something to Give Each Other. Or what about Caroline Polachek’s Desire I Want To Turn Into You – a compelling coming together of pop and the avant-garde?
Pop wasn’t the only genre that had a good year: Bell Witch’s Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate was epic funeral metal; Wednesday’s Rat Saw God delivered first-rank indie rock with grit in its shoes and an evil twinkle in its eye. And Mandy, Indiana’s I’ve Seen A Way merged Nine Inch Nails, Jean-Michel Jarre and the Stranger Things soundtrack with pulverisingly thrilling results.
The Hunger Games-style struggle to purchase concert tickets for in-demand artists such as Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Bruce Springsteen will have left many wondering if it was worth the effort in the first place or whether FOMO is all that bad.
Waiting rooms, pre-sales, pre-sales to the pre-sales, eye-watering service charges – if hell is a place on earth, it may well be Ticketmaster as a big show is about to go on sale. It’s not all the fault of Ticketmaster, as promoters and artists also have a big hand in all of this, but the ticket retailer is at the coal face.
Plus, with prices soaring, many will have paused to reflect on whether there’s a point at which live music ceases to be fun. If you’re paying €700 to see Taylor Swift or €900 for Coldplay, will you enjoy it – or might you have migraine throughout as you think of what you might put all that dosh towards instead? You know the music industry is heading towards a dark place when it is forcing its audience into existential ruminations about how their money is best spent.
A limited edition re-release of Sultans' 1993 debut, Casual Sex was a reminder of the punchy playfulness of the Cork post-punks. It was also a dynamic snapshot of the city in the more carefree early 1990s. Roll on their reunion show at Vicar Street, Dublin, in March.
Pop stars looked to alternative music inspiration through 2023. Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts fizzed a punk-pop energy. Melanie Martinez has listened to more than a few Cure songs.
And Corinne Bailey Rae’s Black Rainbows was an exploration of what it meant to the child of Caribbean immigrants in contemporary Britain that owed more to Sonic Youth than to the tasteful soul-pop that characterised her previous records. It was an inspired pivot, as she demonstrated with a stellar performance at Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.
Ezra Collective created history by becoming the first jazz act to be awarded Britain’s Mercury Prize.
For years, jazz nominations were regarded as tokenistic also-rans at the Mercury. But now they are at the heart of the zeitgeist.
It could only be Taylor Swift, whose Eras tour sent Ticketmaster into meltdown and who then conquered the box office with her official tie-in movie. All three of her summer 2024 Aviva Shows were snapped up in a heartbeat, even with ticket prices tapping out at an eye-watering €700 plus.
She also found time to release her Taylor’s Version re-recording of 1989 – an LP less than a decade old which already feels like a classic. It was worth revisiting, as the new bonus tracks are as good as anything on the record proper. Inevitably, Taylor’s year of conquest finished with Swift named Time magazine's Person Of The Year.
