belfast

A slow afternoon in the warm wooden enclave that is Madden’s Bar, Belfast. A handful of middle-aged Guinness drinkers chat quietly, nestled like comfy dogs in the corner. The lights are low. The music is comforting.Until, blap! Not quite a cowboy entrance, but the door opens and the energy levels leap. In bowl three young men, familiar to the barman, the drinkers and anyone who’s interested in rap or who watches joe.co.uk or Vice videos. Kneecap, the Irish-language band smashing out of Belfast and into the world, are…

‘What’ve I done? Made an eejit of myself?” Terri Hooley snaps when I praise his myriad achievements. “I’m fed up being called The Godfather of Punk – I’m not. I’m just an old hippy and punk was hippies’ revenge, cos you didn’t listen to us first time round!”I had been warned Hooley might be cranky due to the dialysis he undergoes thrice weekly, combined with a busy schedule that involved DJing at recent gigs by the Northern Irish punk bands he brought to light – the Undertones and the Outcasts – and promoting the…

Novels about precarity are a precarious business. Far too many debuts of recent years claim to capture what it is like to be a young person in this age of intersecting economic and social crises, when in reality they focus on a set of experiences that are much narrower, much more class-specific and much more temporary. If you were being uncharitable, you could boil many such books down to “recent arts graduate feels emotionally, financially and erotically unsatisfied and works in the service industry while they figure…

“We pulled the pin and got out of there.”DJ Próvai is curiously unrecognisable without his trademark green, white and orange balaclava. The pseudonymous producer of Kneecap is sitting in a Hungarian Airbnb with his fellow band members, MCs Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara, talking over Zoom. Fifteen hundred miles from home, the Belfast hip-hop provocateurs are still processing the events of the previous weekend.On 12 August, ahead of performing to 10,000 people at West Belfast community festival Féile an Phobail, the group…

As expected, CODA took home the biggest prize at the 2022 Oscars, giving Apple TV+ its first Best Picture award ever. The big four awards were in fact split between four movies, with Will Smith (King Richard) and Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye) winning Best Actor and Best Actress respectively, while Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) picked up Best Director. CODA won all three categories it was nominated in — Best Supporting Actor (Troy Kotsur), Best Adapted Screenplay (Sian Heder), and Best Picture — though…