Re-kindling the fire and fury in the Civil Rights-era music of Nina Simone

I don’t know if you can put a primal scream to music but Josette Bushell-Mingo’s show, Nina – A Story about Me and Nina Simone has all the power of a holler against racism, whether it is in her native London or in Simone’s North Carolina or anywhere else in the world. Bushell-Mingo comes from …

Ballymurphy: The massacre that foreshadowed Bloody Sunday

It’s beautiful when it happens, seeing a seed develop out of the dark soil to become a beautiful flower. It’s the same with truth. Sometimes it too lies hidden in soil, waiting for the time and the conditions to bloom into something beautiful. That time and those conditions have surely arrived for the families of …

Tim Edey on the healing power of music

The thing I love most about watching Tim Edey playing either the guitar or the melodeon, is that he seems to be enjoying it so much and when you see someone do that, you are drawn in even more to the joy of the music being played. It’s obviously more than a job to Tim …

Eastside Arts Festival

There has long been the impression that the north’s Protestants don’t do the arts. It is patently untrue as Eastside Arts festival in East Belfast is about to prove. To my casual eye, it seems that Eastside have got it just right. The most successful festivals manage a perfect mixture of the local and the global, …

Can’t Forget About You … or David Ireland

I was at David Ireland’s uproarious play Can’t Forget About You at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast on Thursday night and it was even better the second time around. The audience, which included comedienne Victoria Wood, were rolling in the aisles in a story where Stevie (Declan Rodgers), a 25-year-old Belfast boy falls in love with …

Dunne scores

Billboard posters were torn from their moorings, flags strained on poles, branches waved like a furious Italian, hats rolled down the street – yes, the force of nature that is Niamh Dunne was in town today to play as part of the Out to Lunch festival in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. Limerick-born Niamh, best-known as a …