Author: Jim Carroll

It’s Banter Salon time again. This time, after hugely entertaining and successful jaunts in Dingle last December and Derry last month, we’re joining our friends at Other Voices for a trip across the Irish Sea to London on Saturday and Sunday April 6 and 7.We’ve a heavyweight list of writers, cultural commentators, artists and thinkers lined up for the weekend in east London including:

Karl Ove Knausgaard for Banter Salon in London

Caoimhin O Raghallaigh – the Irish fiddle player currently to be found in The Gloaming, whose debut album is due for release in the coming months.

Ben Watt – the man from Buzzin’ Fly, Strange Feeling, Everything But the Girl and dozens of other projects on doing things differently in the music industry and the renewed importance of artist development.

Photography – Eva Vermandel, Rich Gilligan and Linda Brownlee on the art of photography and the spark behind innovative and distinctive portraits.

Morley on Bowie – Paul Morley on David Bowie, longevity, pop careers, images, personas and the art of the cultural chameleon.

The campaigner – Maeve O’Rourke from the Justice for the Magdalenescampaign on civil liberties and human rights

Clandestino – Journalist and author Peter Culshaw on his new book about the fascinating life and music of Manu Chao

Music Tech – David Adams (SoundCloud),  Stephen O’Reilly (Mobile Roadie, Topspin) and Mark Nagurski (CultureTECH) on the current state of the music tech field. This panel has been put together by our friends at the CultureTECH festival in Derry.

There will also be performances at the Banter Salon from Shannon Saunders, Luke Sital-Singh and Olivia Chaney

Shannon Saunders

Shannon is an 18-year-old songwriter from Swindon. She has been posting videos on Youtube since she was 14 years old and has accumulated over 3.3 million views and 22,000 subscribers on her channel. Her debut single “Heart Of Blue” reached number 48 on the iTunes chart with no promotion. The video, which cost £9 to make, received over 175,00 views on Youtube in its first month.

Luke Sital-Singh

Luke has just returned from a very successful trip to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas and he has been touring of late with Villagers and The Staves. His new EP “Old Flint” has just gone on release and he will be embarking on a headline tour of the UK in April.

Olivia Chaney

Olivia is a modern English folk singer who has just released a new EP, is performing as Joe Boyd’s special guest at the Legacy of Nick Drake event at Wilton’s Music Hall on April 2, is guesting with Phronesis at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on April 5 and is about to embark on a spring tour with Alasdair Roberts.The Banter Salon will take place upstairs at the Zeppelin Shelter (40 Leman Street, London, Aldgate, E1 8EU), around the corner from the Wilton’s Music Hall where Stornoway, Dexys, Laura Mvula, John Grant, Imelda May, Matthew E White and others will be performing for Other Voices over the weekend. Doors for the Banter Salon will open each day at 2.30pm and the sessions will run from 3pm to 6pm. Admission is free, but capacity is limited so spaces will be allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis.

The impetus for this Banter comes from our recent adventures with The Anti Room podcast. We invited Sinead Gleeson and Anna Carey and their guests to host a live recording of their podcast about feminist issues at Banter last October and it was such a success that we invited them back last month to do another one.

But it also got us thinking about why we never hear men’s issues discussed so openly and freshly in the same way. We also wondered why when it comes to men’s issues that the same tired, boring voices and agendas always hold sway. It’s A Man’s World will look at what it means to be a man in Ireland today, why men don’t talk about issues which affect them and the huge benefits of actually discussing this kind of stuff.

The lads: Sean Moncrieff (Newstalk), John Buckley (SpunOut), John Evoy (founder Irish Men’s Sheds Association) and Damien Mulley (Mulley Communications and a zillion other things).

The details: It’s A Man’s World will take place at the Twisted Pepper (Middle Abbey Street), Dublin on Tuesday February 26. Doors open at 7.30pm and the Bantering gets underway at 8pm sharp. Admission is free, but you need to be signed up to the invite list which you will find here.

Big thanks to Banter kitchen cabinet dude Finian Murphy for the initial idea.

It’s time to Cork. We’ve been meaning to do some Bantering in the southern capital for quite some time so it’s awesome to finally get it together.

The topic for our debut in the city is Doing It Differently, a chance to talk to people who are actively out there doing stuff and doing it with a twist. The overall Irish narrative right now may be about economic doom and gloom, but there are splashes of colour in the midst of all that. And it’s those splashes of colour and people who are not just sitting back fuming amd moaning that we’re keen to highlight.

The bright sparks: James Whelton (CoderDojo), Niamh O’Mahony (journalist, former board member of FORAS and Cork City FC and project manager of an EC-funded Improving Football Governance project in Ireland), Mary Nally (Drop Everything) and Mark Carry (Fractured Air).

Cat Power illustration by Craig Carry from Fractured Air

The details: Doing It Differently will take place at The Pavilion (Carey’s Lane), Cork on Saturday February 16. Doors open at 1.30pm and the Bantering gets underway at 2pm sharp. Admission is free, but you need to be signed up to the invite list which you will find here.

Huge thanks to Joe Kelly at the Pavilion for his help in setting this up.

After the busiest ever year at Banter – 16 sessions in 2012 – we start 2013 with Grow It Yourself.

This discussion has been prompted by the huge number of people who are now growing their own vegtables, herbs and fruit. For example, the Twisted Pepper’s sister venue, the Bernard Shaw, now has the Raver Cottage garden on its roof which provides the cafes and bars in both venues with fresh herbs and veg and we’ve also seen the massive growth in community gardens around the city and country.

We’d going to have a look at what’s behind this movement of going back to growing your own, the scalability and sustainability of this and how people can be encourage to take up a shovel and get digging. We’re doing this at the start of the year too as that’s when people make resolutions to do this kind of thing so this will hopefully prompt them to actually follow through on their good intentions.

The Grow It Yourself panel: Ella McSweeney (RTE’s Ear to the Ground and BBC Radio 4), Kaethe Burt-O’Dea (Sitric Community Garden, SPUDS), Sinead Keenan (Healthy Food For All) and Andrew Douglas (Urban Farm, Dublin). Artist’s impression of what the Urban Farm at Chocolate Factory might look like Venue and date: Twisted Pepper, Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1; Tuesday January 22 (doors open 7.30pm the Banter gets going at 8pm sharp). Tickets: admission is free but you must sign up in advance to our guestlist here. We’ve a lot of really cool Banters on the way in ’13 so make sure to sign up to the mailing list or subscribe to the site to find out more.

Another Way Of Winning is a Banter conversation and Q&A with Guillem Balague about his biography of former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola

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It’s Pep time

Guillem is a key fixture in Sky Sports’ coverage of Spanish football, appearing regularly both on live match coverage and on the weekly round-up show, Revista de La Liga. He is also the UK Correspondent for AS, the Madrid-based Spanish sports newspaper and El Larguero, Spain’s most popular sports radio show, attracting some 1,5 million listeners. His work appears regularly in The Times and in Champions magazine, where he writes a regular column on international football. He also wrote the bestselling “A Season on the Brink”, an insider’s account of Liverpool’s 2004-05 Champions’ League winning campaign, updated later with the 2006 FA Cup victory.

In November 2012 he published the first international biography of Pep Guardiola, Another Way of Winning, based in conversation with him, his former players and Pep’s closest friends.

This event takes place at the Twisted Pepper on December 19. Tickets are now on sale at €8 and €6 (Bodytonic members) a go. As we don’t really expect to have any on sale on the door going on sales so far, get one ASAP if you want to come along to hear Guillem on Pep.

If it’s (nearly) December, that can only mean one thing. It’s time for the Banter Review of the Year.

Going on our track record when we went reeling in the year in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the Review of the Year is always a splendid, entertaining and enlightening night out as our all-star panel run the rule over the events, news stories, heroes and villians of the past 12 months.

Talk to Joe at Banter

Joining me to look back at what was what in current affairs, politics, Ireland, sports and international news during a very busy, eventful and memorable 2012 will be Joe Duffy (Liveline, RTE Rado One), Emmet Malone (The Irish Times’ football correspondant) and Una Mullally (journalist, broadcaster and blogger).

It all happens at the Twisted Pepper, Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1 on Wednesday December 12 (doors open 7.30pm the Banter gets going at 8pm sharp). Admission is free but you must sign up in advance to our guestlist here.

Please note that we expect this one to be very busy and we expect a full house in the newly extended main room in the Twisted Pepper so make sure you sign up for it today.

It gives us great pleasure to head to Dingle, Co Kerry on December 1 and 2 for the Banter Salon at Foxy John’s as part of this year’s Other Voices festival in the town. It’s our first time in Dingle, our first time at Other Voices and our first time to host a Banter in a hardware shop. Yes, it has been a year for unusual Banter venues.

The Banter Salon arrives at Foxy John’s for Other Voices

The Banter Salon at Foxy John’s will feature a wide variety of discussions and conversations over the weekend including:

– Guardian media writer Lisa O’Carroll on a wild year for the media business

– Jerry Kennelly (Stockbyte and Tweak) and Kieran Murphy (Murphy’s Ice Cream) discussing where the spark to create something innovative come from

– Historian and author Diarmaid Ferriter on a decade of centenaries and if your ancestors realised what was coming down the line in 1912

– From the Silver Threads of Hope anthology of new Irish short stories, Peter Murphy and Siobhan Mannion read from their work and are joined by anthology editor Sinead Gleeson for a discussion about Irish literature in post-boom Ireland

– The Observer’s editor, John Mulholland, on the view from the editor’s desk in 2012.

– Poet Paul Muldoon on his new book The Word On The Street: Rock Lyrics and

– Dermot McLaughlin, director of Derry City Of Culture 2013, on what’s ahead for the Maiden City in 2013.

There will also be performances at the Banter Salon on both days from various acts playing at Other Voices.

Admission will be free, but capacity is strictly limited so it will be first come, first served when doors open each day at 4pm.

After The Anti Room takeover last week (so good that we’ll definitely do it again in 2013), it’s back to business as usual at Banter this month. The politics of showbiz is a topic which has been on the to-do list for ages and it’s great that we’ve finally got around to it.

The biggest growth area in media coverage over the last few years has come from showbiz, social diary, gossip and entertainment pages, websites, TV sections and radio shows. This is the media’s real appeal for many readers – not investigate journalism or hard-hitting political exposes, despite many hacks and editors think.

Banter will look at the people on the showbiz desk and those who feature week in and week out in those pages. Who decides who gets covered and why? What do readers get from this? Are readers just a nosey bunch living vicariously through all this coverage of parties and launches or does it say something more about our psyches? And what exactly are the politics of showbiz?

Our showbiz panel: Rosanna Davison (former Miss World, model and columnist), Eoin Murphy (Entertainment Editor, Irish Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday) and Niamh Horan (The Sunday Independent).

Diary date: Wednesday November 21 at the Twisted Pepper (Middle Abbey St., Dublin 1). Doors open at 7.30pm, the bantering starts at 8pm and admission is free but you need to sign up to the invite list here.

Mo’ Banter: our annual review-of-the-year takes place at the Twisted Pepper on December 12. And eyes peeled for some very special Banter news next week.

The final stop in our festival summer tour is the Electric Picnic in Stradbally, Co Laois and this one is going to be interesting.

Did the media fail Ireland? will look at how the domestic media (online and offline) has covered the post-boom fallout and why the real stories which matter so much now never materialised until it was too late.

The Banter panel: Simon Carswell (The Irish Times and author of Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank That Broke Ireland and Something Rotten: Irish Banking Scandals), Carol Hunt (The Sunday Independent), John Ryan (Broadsheet) and Enda Leahy (Irish Mail On Sunday).

Banter at Electric Picnic details: Mindfield stage, Sunday September 2, 3.45pm-ish

Big thanks to Naoise Nunn for the invitation.

When we started out doing Banter back in 2009 in a tiny room upstairs in the Twisted Pepper, we never thought we’d end up here. A packed room in the Meyrick Hotel on Galway’s Eyre Square and the legendary Nile Rodgers in the Banter frame.

Our first involvement with the Galway Arts Festival, Banter’s Conversation with Nile Rodgers was a fantastic hour in the life of the man behind dozens and dozens of Chic hits, the producer who worked with everyone from David Bowie to Duran Duran and the author of the fantastic “Le Freak” autobiography. Many yarns were told as Rodgers talked and talked and talked some more. Every so often, he’d get the audience to yell “freak out!” which is something we must try out at future Banters. He even gave out to us for talking too fast and asking long-winded questions. Total legend.

Thanks to all at the Galway Arts Festival and Gugai at the Roisin Dubh for their help with this event.

Banter‘s annual odyssey to Donegal for the Earagail Arts Festival lead us to the late, great painter Derek Hill’s kitchen (complete with a Picasso on the wall) at the Glebe House and Gallery in Churchill just outside Letterkenny for the Glebe Cultural Summit.

Our contribution to the Summit was Irish Culture and The Way It Might Not Look at You. This saw film-maker Lenny Abrahamson, performer Little John Nee, Dublin Fringe director Róise Goan and writer and broadcaster Sinead Gleeson taking part in a lengthy, intriguing, entertaining and provocative look at how Irish culture, from books to films to theatre, has dealt with – or has not dealt with – the issues and stories of the Irish boom and bust. Thanks to Derek O’Connor, Paul Brown and all at the Earagail Arts Festival for their help with this one.

Derek Hill’s kitchen. Photo by Ianthe Ruthven 

Limerick’s inaugural Make a Move festival of hip-hop culture was the first stop in our summer tour for a panel on Irish Hip-Hop: Got to Get Up to Get Down. We were joined at the Daghdha Church by Paul Tarpey (Cheebah), Kieran Nolan (founder of irishhiphop.com), mynameisjOhn and Temper-Mental MissElayneous to run the rule over the past, present and future of life on the Irish hip-hop beat. From RTE’s Ireland’s Rappers documentary to Scary Eire and beyond, it was a hugely engaging hour in the life of the culture. Many thanks to Shane Curtin and all at Make A Move for the invitation and hospitality.

The Banter panel (from left): Jim Carroll, TemperMental MissElayneous, Kieran Nolan, mynameisjOhn and Paul Tarpey. Photo by Shane Serrano 

Best Banter ever? When we started this off in 2009, we never thought that we would (a) still be going three years later or (b) be able to persuade the legendary Bill O’Herlihy and Brian Kerr to join us for some Bantering.

But that’s how things have turned out. Bill, Brian and Miguel Delaney joined us for The Football Special as we looked back on the club football season, had a bit of a banter about various highlights, tut-tutted over various lowlights and reviewed the action at home and away. Of course, that was merely the preamble for a fantastic preview of the Euro 2012 championships.

Big thanks to all three panelists and the huge turnout for a cracking night. It was certainly the first time we’ve seen Banter panelists mobbed as they left the stage. We’ll have the “I Can’t Believe Bill O’Herlihy Is In the Twisted Pepper” t-shirts on sale soon.

The last thing we expected when we were putting this panel together were insights on Proust, brothels, oranges, Ann Summers, FOMO, Buddhism and neuroscience when Banter considered the issue of The Attention Economy. But such were the twists and turns taken on the night by our panelists Michael Foley (author of the bestselling The Age Of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to be Happy, and the forthcoming Embracing the Ordinary), Finian Murphy (consumer and media researcher) and Roisin Ingle (The Irish Times). Thanks too to those in the audience who poked us with questions on everything from Sky News to click activism.

Rip It Up & Start Again gathered together a panel of journalism practitioners to look at the current state of the trade, where it goes from here, the rise of content aggregators and curators and what this means for established publications and titles.

Thanks to our panelists – Frank Fitzgibbon (Editor, The Sunday Times Ireland), Brian Fallon (co-founder Distilled Media – The Journal, Boards.ie, Daft.ie), Gavin Sheridan (The Story.ie, Storyful) and Paul Mallon (ex-deputy editor The Star On Sunday and assistant editor The Star, currently editorial manager at Paddy Power) – for an illuminating night out. No doubt, we will be engaging in more omphaloskepsis on the state of the media trade in future Banters.