It's hard times for almost every business (are you aware, even drugs prices have gone down, there is a real willingness to fight hard for clients), show business included. Two weeks ago they officially announced Heavenly Planet Festival cancellation. Sharon with her Big Band was one of their headliners. And they couldnt blame poor tix sales as it was a free event, mind it! In that case the "greediness" of sponsors came handy.. Fucking recession..
This mini tour is doing well so far. But everything depends on the fans' loyality (and their willingness to support their heros)
So a bit more of gentle pushing:
Folk and Jazz Reviews: A festival of funBy Jim Gilchrist
The Scotsman
Published Date: 25 March 2009WHEN the Sharon Shannon Big Band takes the stage in characteristically dynamic form at The Picture House in Edinburgh on 17 April, it will be joined by two forceful, not to say unpredictable, guest personalities, the shambolically charismatic Shane MacGowan and the slinkily seductive French-Irish chanteuse, Camille O'Sullivan.
Not that Shannon, the diminutive and hugely popular Irish accordionist, fresh from last week's Meteor Awards – Ireland's equivalent of the Brits – where she collected a Lifetime Achievement Award, is in any need of reinforcements. Her current big-baADVERTISEMENTnd format combines her fiercely dexterous button-accordion playing with a very contemporary line-up combining established traditional players, such as banjo and fiddle master Gerry O'Connor and fiddler Dezi Donnelly, with the likes of saxophonist Richie Buckley and electric guitarist Jack Maher.
She is characteristically enthusiastic about the Edinburgh gig, part of the capital's Ceilidh Culture traditional arts festival (the band also plays Inverness's Ironworks on 16 April), with the dentally-challenged and famously bibulous MacGowan and the sultry O'Sullivan.
"It's just brilliant having them," she says from her home in Galway. "I've toured with Shane loads of times and I find him great to work with. And Camille's a good friend but I haven't toured with her before – she sings a great Shane MacGowan song called Mama Lou that we'll be doing together." In fact, she says the first time she saw O'Sullivan perform was on that Irish TV institution, The Late, Late Show (to which she's no stranger herself as a guest), when O'Sullivan was duetting with none other than MacGowan.
She describes herself as "absolutely thrilled" at the lifetime achievement award, for which she is reportedly the youngest-ever winner. "So they're saying," she laughs, while neither denying it nor revealing her age. Suffice to say that, having first made her name with The Waterboys, she brought out her bestselling first album 18 years ago. Her current "best of" compilation, The Galway Girl, has attained triple-platinum status in Ireland, a country perhaps less given to musical pigeonholing than here, and where folk musicians can sometimes be fêted as national institutions.
Undoubtedly, she agrees, the album's popularity was boosted by the title track, a Steve Earle song she recorded with the Irish signer-songwriter Mundy, gaining wide exposure through a Bulmers Cider advert.
The plaudits, however, follow a grim period for Shannon, whose long-term partner, Leo Healy, died suddenly of a heart attack last May. Basically she has thrown herself into her work since. "The music has been a massive help," she says, "although my life is something completely different now."
While the accordionist has dabbled energetically in such diverse genres as Cajun, reggae and hip-hop, and collaborated with celebrities ranging from U2's Adam Clayton and Bono to the RTE Concert Orchestra, from Mark Knopfler to The Chieftains, she remains steeped in the traditional music with which she grew up near Corofin, County Clare. "That's my favourite music of all time," she says decisively.
She was strongly influenced early on by the music of the then Clare-based Donegal fiddle maestro Tommy Peoples who in turn, like most Donegal players, had absorbed the Scottish music that travelled over there. So Shannon, who also totes a mean fiddle herself, has a drop of the Scotch in her own music, she reckons.
Shannon and company are the highest-profile names billed in Edinburgh's three-week Ceilidh Culture festival of traditional arts, which encourages grassroots activity in areas such as storytelling and ceilidh dancing, while acting as an opportunistic umbrella for other events such as the Edinburgh International Harp Festival.
The rest of the article here
I really hope it's not half empty. Is the bloody recession biting?
