A Year In Music – 2024 – Niall McCann (Film Director)
by Killian Laher

What sort of year have you had?

I’d forgotten how difficult these questions are! I have had a relentless year broken by moments of extreme procrastination. So pretty much par for the course really.

What are the albums you enjoyed most this year?

These are some of the albums I listened to and enjoyed this year:

Lúireach  – Landless

Ballads Of Harry Houdini – Papa M

Rampen (APM: Alien Pop Music) – EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN

The Collective – Kim Gordon

Jake Xerxes Fussell –  When I’m Called

No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead – Godspeed You! Black Emperor

To All Trains – Shellac

Jim White & Marisa Anderson – Swallowtail

Love Changes Everything – Dirty Three

A Lazarus Soul – No Flowers Grow In Cement Gardens

Soft Tissue – Tindersticks

Bleed – The Necks

Is there any artist or album that defined the year for you?

My artist of the year is someone who I think sums up the moral contradictions and hypocrisy at the heart of Western liberalism; Nick Cave. I think the music he and the Bad Seeds have been making since Skeleton Key has been remarkable and how those records document, deal, and process grief is genuinely moving. I really liked their latest album Wild God (some of the production by Dave Fridmann less so) but Cave’s public statements on Israel are extremely disappointing. Would he have broken the blockade on Apartheid South Africa? Israel uses culture as a form of propaganda to whitewash and justify its occupation and apartheid over the Palestinian people. The BDS movement is justified and necessary.

Nick Cave is an artist whose work speaks so often about good and evil, yet he can’t see both these things when they are staring him in the face. Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, you can’t sit on the fence on this one.

Do you get to many gigs these days?

Not as many as I would like but more than I deserve. The year started with Kurt Wagner in the National Concert Hall, during which if you went to the toilet, the staff at the door wouldn’t let you back in (this was not flagged in any way beforehand). By the end of the show, there was about 40 people in the lobby, very pissed off. They did let us watch it through a glass window in the lobby. Which was nice.

Godspeed You Black Emperor in the National Stadium left me deafened for weeks, one of the loudest and most brilliant gigs I have ever been to. Califone in the Grand Social in November was my favourite of the year. I have loved their music (specifically the music of Tim Rutili) for decades and waited 10 years to see them play Dublin again. I last saw them in Whelans, there was about 6 people in the audience and Tim asked us: “Do you guys not know any women?”

Which reminds me of the final Microdisney gigs in Dublin when Luke Haines asked the women in the audience to repeat a refrain of one of his songs, before adding: “But there are no women here”. Which is not true, there were at least 3.

Do you think it will get to the stage where the ‘big concert’ is unaffordable for most of us?

I don’t really enjoy them and try to avoid them as much as possible. In Dublin we are very lucky to have three amazing concert promoters in Enthusiastic Eunuch (Vinny Dermody), Foggy Notions (Leagues O’Toole and David Connaughton) and Umack (Paul Timoney). I am very much looking forward to The Necks (promoter EE) and Earth (FN and Umack) next year.

What’s your reaction if Stairway to Heaven comes on the radio?

I don’t get to hear the radio much or really at all so I would probably be surprised they are still playing it on the radio? Is that what they play on the radio these days? I would prefer to hear Hairway to Steven by the Butthole Surfers.

Anything in the works yourself?

New film will be finished next year (finally) and hopefully a few other things will come to fruition.