The Internet is a curious and marvellous playground of ideas and oddities. Here are 7 of the strangest “musical” YouTube phenomena currently racking up the views right now. Warning, these will worm their way into that part of your brain that refuses to let go of things. I prescribe a lovely strong dose of Wilco […]
Spotted this the other night as I was flicking through one of my dad’s final sketchbooks. To me this sketch is a haiku that folds a whole universe into it. This was the last time he drew me and it is a great snapshot of a fond moment. Drawn on a sweltering humid day in […]
I adore the podcast format and I’m an avid fan of all audio longform storytelling. I’ll do a post at another time about some of my favourite podcasts, but this post is about the brief spell where I produced a podcast of my own. It was motivated by two creative impulses. Firstly I wanted to […]
This is a poem I started writing when I lived in New York and was starting to forge a really keen interest in poetry, and specifically performance poetry. The poem was supposed to be a snapshot of the punters I saw in a bar in Manhattan called Tom & Jerry’s. But the original draft was […]
the best of the batch – a baker’s dozen of brownbread mixtape tracks by The Brownbread Mixtape We record every single Brownbread Mixtape, and we have managed to capture some truly magical moments down the years from that room. Nowadays it is easier to share things digitally (even though we have yet to truly share […]
One of the more bizarre things I can list amongst my artistic achievements is award winning songwriter. Here’s the short version of how that came to pass. Back in 2010, our leading newspaper The Irish Times put out a call to write an alternative Irish anthem. It was to be judged by members of the […]
At my monthly Brownbread Mixtape show I would regularly write radio style comedy sketches to be performed by myself and our resident sketch troupe The Brownbread Players (Gus McDonagh, Eva Bartley and Sean McDonagh). I have been a huge Werner Herzog fan for many moons and something tickled me about trying to do one of […]
A few years ago my good friend, documentary filmmaker David Bagnall (Getting Out), was visiting from New York, so we met up with another friend and filmmaker, David O’Sullivan (Moore Street Masala), and headed out without a script, and decided to try and make a short film in a single day. There was such a freedom […]
I was sifting through an old series of sketchbooks I kept during my time living in New York and found some fun old doodles, ideas and unfinished concepts. This one, The Table of Ideas, was one that I’m no longer sure what I was trying to do with. I know that it was inspired […]
On June 24th 2007 I was waiting for my wife outside a shop at the corner of Ann Street and Nassau Street in downtown Manhattan in New York City. I bent down to tie my shoelaces and suddenly saw the bustling New York street from an unusual perspective. So, I decided to take a few […]
