Irish music sales – already hugely depressed as a result of illegal downloading – have hit a new low. Overall, album sales are down by 23.6 per cent on last year. Bands have been dropped from rosters, distributors and shops have shut their doors, record company staff are being laid off. Sunday Business P0st

Read fascinating book review in Archaeology Ireland

Dennis Casey is still the new guy in Flogging Molly. Interview at http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/music/entries/2009/09/26/acl_2009_preview_flogging_moll.html

This Vancouver-band of Yukon musicians is branching out … More at http://www.straight.com/article-258841/whiskeydicks-do-it-all-love-liquor

Imelda May, Shane McGowan, Jerry Fish and various Waterboys guest on Sharon Shannon’s new album, ‘Saints and Scoundrels’ Eamon Carr interviews her for the Evening Herald.

These Spaniards effectively combine Irish music with modern sounds

THE walls were steaming, a Russian band Slua Si was blazing out The Bucks of Oranmore to a crowd of around 200 doing a massive Walls of Limerick dance. Perhaps it should have been the Walls of the Lubyanka, for I was in a large Moscow pub in the shadows of the old KGB headquarters [...]

THE credit of recording the first Irish music on banjo goes to James Wheeler. With Edward Herborn accompanying him on the box, they made their first recordings in 1916 and 1917.
Mike Flanagan of the famous Flanagan Brothers played banjo. Born in Waterford in 1898, he started out playing the mandolin. His lively technique can be [...]

By Mac Entee
The Bothy Band was a good idea waiting to happen. Around 1970, flute player Matt Molloy, fiddler Tommy Peoples, piper Peter Browne and singer Triona Ní Dhomhnaill had been performing in a group called 1691 along with singer Liam Weldon.
Piper Paddy Keenan had been playing around Dublin with singers Micheal and Triona Ni [...]

The McPeake family of Belfast were one of the few Irish pre-ballad boom groups. That they were better-known abroad than at home is illustrated by a story told about a conversation between Bob Dylan and Bono of U2 in 1984. The legendary singer asked what Bono thought of the McPeakes. The Dublin-born Bono had never [...]