Gugai is an old Irish word for an egg. My twin sister was born with hair and I was born without it, and the first thing my mother said when I was handed to her was \u201cmy little gugai\u201d. It just stuck, and now the only people that don\u2019t call me Gugai are my mother and my twin sister. I have had it longer than my actual name. <\/p>\n
I grew up near Castleconnell and I went to school in The Crescent in Limerick City<\/a>. It was great, a lot of my friends were in bands. If it wasn\u2019t English or history, I had very little interest in school. I tend to be very focused on some things to the detriment of almost everything else. <\/p>\n I went to college in Galway<\/a> in 1996 and I did arts, studying English, history, politics and philosophy in first year. I definitely loved the student life more than the student work. I had a great time but I didn\u2019t last very long. Once I ran my first gig, that was it for me. A few years later, in 2004, Simon Heaslip, Kevin Healy, Greg Healy and I bought the R\u00f3is\u00edn Dubh where I have been music booker ever since. I also book the acts for Big Top at the Galway International Arts Festival<\/a>. <\/p>\n My friends in Limerick had bands, so we were used to going and seeing gigs. When I came to Galway, there just didn\u2019t seem to be any young original bands playing anywhere. Everywhere was a covers band pub. The main reason I started running gigs was to put on something that I would like to see. <\/p>\n We do about 400 shows a year, from 30 to 4,000 capacity including the Big Top. I always try to focus on developing acts. I do a lot of stuff with Strange Brew, an independent music promoter, record label and radio show. On Thursday and Friday night at the R\u00f3is\u00edn we put on a couple of bands from 12am to 2am and there\u2019s no cover charge, and we pay them. That\u2019s just a really good way of getting bands in front of audiences and getting them to a level where they have fans.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why grassroots venues are so important for artists \u2013 you don\u2019t get to play huge venues unless you are an essentially manufactured kind of band, unless you have worked and embarrassed yourself and made mistakes in small rooms. That is where people learn how to perform and how to interact with crowds and sound engineers and build their audiences. <\/p>\n There are so many stadium shows and festivals for a country of this size. But if you want to go see Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift in Dublin that is going to set you back \u20ac500, or Oasis or Stevie Wonder \u2013 that\u2019s going to cost you a lot of money. That might have taken you to 15 or 20 gigs in a smaller venue like the R\u00f3is\u00edn Dubh or Coughlan\u2019s in Cork City. <\/p>\n It can be hard booking acts, but the one advantage we have is that everybody loves coming to Galway. There\u2019s a wildness to Galway \u2013 the weather is insane, but it\u2019s just so vibrant. There is such a mix of people from all over the world who come through here and they stay and never leave, or else they leave and they come back every year. It\u2019s always had this mad artistic energy that permeates through the whole city. <\/p>\n Fifteen years ago, some of the really big successful bands sounded like they could have been English or American. But now if you look at Ireland, all these bands that are huge international successes couldn\u2019t be from anywhere else in the world other than Ireland. And that is incredible. That\u2019s what I really love to see. It\u2019s not a band that you could pick up and put anywhere else. You listen to Madra Salach, Kneecap<\/a> or CMAT<\/a> \u2013 any of these bands you know straight away that they are Irish.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Camille O\u2019Sullivan on her cancer: \u2018You have to go further than a smear test\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think there is anywhere else in the world I would rather live in than Ireland. A lot of Irish people who moved away feel like that. A lot of people I know who moved away are just waiting to move back. <\/p>\n I am proud to be Irish. It\u2019s one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The whole west coast of Ireland along the Atlantic<\/a> is incredible. I have been to beaches all over the world and there is nowhere as nice as the west of Ireland on a sunny day, the rare amount of them that we get. Someone once told me that we are much better off that way because if the weather was any better it would just be full of English people all the time, so maybe we should be thankful for the rain keeping tourism down. <\/p>\n We\u2019re definitely not like other English-speaking countries. Everyone knows that. When you are in London you can spot the Irish people on the Tube by the people who say hello when they get on. There is definitely a lyricism to the way Irish people think and talk. There are a lot of incredibly talented people in Ireland. Maybe it is just that their talent gets nurtured a bit more and that pub culture\/trad session culture is a bit more ingrained in Irish people \u2013 we just love singalongs.<\/p>\n There is a lot of negativity at the moment, this \u201cIreland for Irish people\u201d bullshit, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a huge populist movement. I think that is an insane, radical, small and very vocal group of crazy people that don\u2019t understand what Irishness is, or know why Irish people are everywhere around the world. Anyone in Ireland who gives out about immigrants<\/a> coming into Ireland should take a look at what we did to other countries. We should be the most welcoming country in the world because every country took us in. <\/p>\n In conversation with Niamh Browne<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gugai is an old Irish word for an egg. My twin sister was born with hair and I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[893,93,631,4500,106964,61,1629,60,10366,1396,44,709,1454,32864],"class_list":["post-659204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-cmat","tag-entertainment","tag-for-you","tag-galway","tag-galway-international-arts-festival","tag-ie","tag-immigration","tag-ireland","tag-kneecap","tag-limerick","tag-limerick-city","tag-magazine","tag-me-myself-and-ireland","tag-wild-atlantic-way"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}