Home / What's On / Oct / Mick Flannery
MUSIC
Saturday 31 October 2009 at 8pm
Mick Flannery
with special guest Kate Walsh
Tickets: €15
In the last year Mick Flannery has gone from part time stonemason to one of Ireland's most sought after musicians.
Since the release of his album ‘White Lies’ he has played a string of sold out shows all over Ireland, been nominated for the Choice album awards, been cited as ‘Most Promising Newcomer’ by Hotpress readers and won ‘Best Male’ at the Meteor awards.
Mick Flannery on MUZU.
Mick Flannery's first real connection to music was watching an unplugged Nirvana covering Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”.
After a stint in a music college in Cork, he travelled to the U.S. where he “wandered around for a time.” While there, he entered the U.S. Songwriting Competition in Nashville, Tennessee and, to his surprise, won two top awards for his compositions becoming the first Irish musician to do so. “The Tender” won First Prize in the “Lyrics Only” category; “In the Gutter” took First Place in the “Folk/Singer-Songwriter” category (Judges included Tom Waits, Loretta Lynn, Sonny Rollins, John Scofield, Macy Gray and others).
Mick cites his mother as being a major influence on his early musical tastes: “My mother's side were big into music, more than my dad's side. My mother is a singer and she plays the guitar. And it was her brothers and sisters that kind of got me into music. At those family nights there was a good bit of Tom Waits, a bit of Dylan. Most of the singers would be female, my aunts, and they would sing Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell”.
The Waits influence is apparent in Mick's work while his gravelly voice has also drawn comparisons to singers like Bruce Springsteen and Ray Lamontagne.
Support act is the brilliant English singer/songwriter Kate Walsh. Kate Walsh's major breakthrough came with her second album Tim House's, which scored a number one position on the iTunes UK Hot 100 download chart, knocking Take That and the Kaiser Chiefs off the top spot in the process, not bad considering the album was made in a friend's bedroom and released on her own record label.
A classically trained pianist and accomplished guitarist, she has drawn comparisons to female songwriting giants such as Joni Mitchell and has cited Tori Amos, Talk Talk and Kate Bush as major influences. In one of those strange quirks of fate, Kate's track 'Your Song' was featured in the US spin-off to Grey's Anatomy - Private Practice - featuring none other than her namesake and female lead of the show, American actress Kate Walsh.
http://www.myspace.com/mickflannery
http://www.myspace.com/katewalsh
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