Yesterday (26 July), singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse was laid to rest in her native London. For years, the public watched the troubled star battle with severe drug and alcohol addiction. Surprisingly, before her rise to stardom in the mid noughties, not only was Amy not a drug user, but she was avidly anti-drugs.

The story of the girl’s life changed and personal factors and relationships combined to send her down a slippery slope to drug addiction. Since then, it seems that for many people, even her own mother, Amy’s eventual demise was only a matter of time.

The loss of a much loved, well respected star to drug addiction, and all the attention given to it, is an opportunity for us to look at the way in which we deal with addiction in this country.

A group of Irish artists together with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) have launched a cultural boycott of Israel. By Eamonn Costello.

At a gathering in Dublin's Temple Bar, creative and performing artists undertook to boycott Israel by refusing to perform, or to allow their work be displayed there.

The signatures of over 160 poets, writers, actors, playwrights, dancers, sculptors, musicians and visual artists were collected for a pledge “not to avail of any invitation to perform or exhibit in Israel, nor to accept any funding from any institution linked to the government of Israel, until such time as Israel complies with international law and universal principles of human rights”.

Legendary. Genius. Phenomenal.

Superlatives such as these rear their ugly faces far too often in popular usage. They are cheapened in a world of short-term disposable celebrities, where questions over the talent or wealth of said celebrities are hushed by a media world which pilfers to commercialism over public interest.

But.

When it comes to The Beatles...

From the silliest vaudeville (Maxwell’s Silver Hammer) to the politicised Revolution, from rock ‘n’ roll (Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey) to lullaby (Good Night), from the impassioned Something to carefully crafted pop – dare I say it – genius (Help, Drive My Car, Can’t Buy Me Love, Penny Lane, Hey Jude, too many more to mention), acoustic numbers (Blackbird, Mother Natures Son) and psychediala to boot (Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever, Across the Universe), The Beatles’s music still lives on.

The old Temple Bar Music Centre sign still hangs on the side of the building, but the Button Factory is a new venue. Gone is the dank cellar of the past, entered through a narrow, steep staircase, past the long benches at the back where zombies wandered. Now we have carpets, mood lighting and soft wood, and a wide expanse of stage visible from the bar at the back of the venue. The slight air of yuppiefication is acceptable in the context of what we had in the past. Worth a visit, if you have not yet been.

That you can now see the stage from the bar means a lot of people hang around the back, especially though the support act. Main act Efterklang had no such problem, with an enthusiastic crowd abandoning their comfortable seats to get closer to the action. The Danish group arrived dressed for the show looking like a bunch of granddads, all wearing white shirts with tight cuffs and high-waisted slacks, offset only by the occasional rakish scarf and the female piano player Anna Bronsted (also the support act), who did not look at all like anybody's grandparent.

Efterklang began in typical form, which is loud, melodic and orchestral post-rock, reminiscent of Arcade Fire or Radiohead at times, with a wall of sound that can only be achieved in a live setting by having eight people playing different instruments and also drumming on every surface they can find. Choruses rise and fall like waves, songs last for ten minutes but never get tired. It was difficult to understand where exactly they were hiding the extra instruments, but as well as their 'normal' array of guitars, keyboard, percussion and singing, they regularly produced whistles, a bunch of mussel shells, a handheld xylophone, trumpets, bugles and what may or may not have been a flugelhorn.
The band are very interested in the visual element of their work, with intricate videos accompanying their songs, and exciting visuals and lights at the show, although the strobe was overbearing at times.

  
The frontman Casper Clausen, boasting a schoolboy pudding-bowl haircut, seemed so genuinely pleased to be there that his enthusiasm became infections. He informed us that they were very happy to be there on the night as a full band, as a show in Britain the night before had been cancelled when Peter the guitarist had been prevented from entering the country. This allowed him to engage in some light insults of the Brits, a guaranteed crowd pleaser at most Irish gigs.

While the band pumped out the tunes, they failed to really lift the tenor of the show to something more than just good. It may be that these Danes are just too nice for rock and roll. It would be impossible to imagine them smashing their instruments, for example. That may be expecting too much, but unless they learn to cut loose a bit more, their live shows will be fun, with fine musicianship, but lacking a certain something (although it must be said that the sound levels were low during the gig). For all my complaining, the Button Factory crowd loved it, with encores demanded and much love being received by our gracious host Casper, who beamed like he had just won the gold medal in the school sports day.  

The fact that most of the crowd was listening intently to her music did not seem to lift the spirits of Carly Blackman, known to us as Carly Sings. She has herself described her sound as ‘like Leonard Cohen if he was a girl', so a certain amount of darkness is to be expected, but her performance and body language towards the audience in Whelans on Saturday 22 March was verging on hostile. That said, she does look pretty when she's angry. She acknowledged her bad mood to the crowd, a frame of mind at odds with the occasionally light-hearted rambling banter between pop songs with French lyrics she languidly strummed along to on acoustic guitar. Carly Sings walked off the stage without a word at the end of her support slot. We all have bad days at work.

Baby Dee ushered in a different atmosphere, one with a distinct whiff of the circus. Dressed in a Dalmatian-spotted hoodie, with a shock of red hair poking out the top and unfeasibly large hobnail boots laced to the middle, Baby Dee plonked herself down at a keyboard and launched into a tune, after calling to the bar for ‘Lugnuts', the bass player in the band who soon appeared on stage. Hammering at the keys and singing at the top of her voice, then quietly tinkling and whispering, all in the same breath, Baby Dee makes it obvious from the start that she is a performer, at times reminiscent of Tom Waits in his Black Rider days, her voice soaring, rumbling, growling and squeaking. Humour is never far away, with Dee making sure there were not any albinos in the audience, then launching into cabaret with the chorus ‘You just can't keep a good albino down'.

Having been around the New York scene for several decades, she has built up a reputation and lots of friends. Her new album Safe Inside The Day, on the Drag City label, features Bonnie Prince Billy on backing vocals and Andrew WK on drums. Baby Dee has worked with Anthony Hegarty (of Johnsons fame) and their music is comparable in some ways, featuring delicate piano and soaring vocals. The fact that Baby Dee is transgendered is another similarity, although Anthony just dresses up.

Some at the gig had no idea what to expect from the singer, and found it difficult to make sense of the constantly shifting style and vocal ranges. With Baby Dee traditional song structure is briefly but frequently thrown out the window, then picked up and put back together, the glue of the rhythm section holding everything together. The band seemed mesmerised by the spectacle playing alongside them, whose unpredictability kept them on their toes, such as when she played a passage, then told them ‘we're gonna do that again', without anybody missing a beat.

Baby Dee shines on the harp as well as the piano. Unlike Joanna Newsom's instrument, Dee's harp suffers for her art, being frequently struck with an open palm, or played forcefully enough to cause reverb, and ends up rocking out, covered in sweat. Brought to Ireland by the Foggy Notions crew, Baby Dee was a singular treat for live music fans.   

One would usually not expect to see a man with dreadlocks, eyeliner, suitcase and record player walk on stage in a small country pub. But as the audience soon learned when the gig in question is a gig with Duke Special the ordinary gets thrown out the window.

This column has never been all that enthusiastic about the impact, real or potential, of blogging. More often than not I'm the old fart who reckons it's like talking to oneself without the exciting frisson of insanity, and I have only occasionally seen blogs on political matters that don't end up replicating or at least relying upon the same old mainstream sources.

But while I could never get excited about, eg, the bloggers who brought down Dan Rather, the situation that exists, as I write in late September, in Burma/Myanmar is another story entirely. “Heroic” and “important” are perfectly reasonable words to describe the sort of work being squeezed out of that country over the web. By Harry Browne

Showing in the IFI from 18 – 31 May, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is a documentary on the life of the iconic front man of The Clash.

By Maggie Gerrity
Think of a famous philosopher. Does Aristotle come to mind? Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps? What about Bono?

U2 has established itself as a band with both style and substance. Fans have spent decades debating the meaning of lyrics and watching as the band has crusaded against poverty, AIDS, and other social causes. But does U2 really matter outside the realm of popular music?

A friend from Northern Ireland, a journalist, called me late last week, as she does on different occasions, to chat about some new book, or album, or to dissect some recent political event.

Came So Far For Beauty, performed as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, is a tribute to the songs of Leonard Cohen. Jessie Collins charts his life, poetry and multiple affairs.

As Oxegen struggles to recover from bad press, John Reynolds' Electric Picnic festival is set to be the gig of the summer. By John Byrne

At 59, singer Emmylou Harris has survived such hardships and successes in both her personal and professional lives as to inspire a slue of country songs. Profile by Jessie Collins.

My 15-year-old nephew Barry predicted, on the basis of one hearing of their songs, that the heavy-metal band Lordi would win the Eurovision with “Hard Rock Hallelujah”.

Edward O'Hare speaks to opera singer Luisa Islam Ali Zade.

It's a cool and cloudy Friday night as our taxi cruises to a halt outside the Wembley Arena. Hundreds of hopefuls are hanging around in the unlikely chance of getting a ticket at some kind of reasonable price. The ticket touts have them, and they're all over the place asking up to £400 for a £10 ticket. Inside, stall-sellers are flogging every conceivable form of Bowie paraphernalia. Earrings, key-rings, various teeshirts, glossy souvenir programmes. Money changes hands even faster at several bars dispensing pint-size plastic cups of bitter and lager.

Garret FitzGerald is ruining the art of conversation. Was a time you went down the pub and you chatted about work and movies and music and people you knew and what was on the Late Late last week and guess which TD I just saw throwing up inside in the jacks. Must have been all the words he's had to eat since the last election. That kind of thing.

The man shook his head, sighed, and then nodded resignedly, as if trying to decide which expression of disgust best suited the occasion. "Where would you get it, Brendan?", he asked. "My God. Where would you? Coast to Coast." He made a noise like he'd just discovered a fly in his drink. "Bbwatttshhh!!!!"