Michael Sinclair

Music

And So I Watch You From Afar

When I got home to Northern Ireland, to the inevitable rain and grey skies which we have come to accept with the same tacit melancholy with which a patient dog bears an annoying toddler pulling its tail, I was excited about getting back down to Belfast to see some of...
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Posted Apr. 27, 2009
Music

General Fiasco

When I headed out to see General Fiasco play the Bar Academy in Birmingham last week, I wasn’t sure what to expect from a band I had seen so often in Belfast, coming over for their first headline tour in England, away from the mates and supporters to whom they...
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Posted Mar. 10, 2009
Music

Battle of the Bands heats 3 & 4

After missing Heat 2 of this year’s Battle of the Bands, I headed back to Tempo for the third and fourth heats last week in the hope of seeing some more good bands and hearing some more interesting sounds. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the crowd was roughly...
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Posted Mar. 3, 2009
AlbumsMusic

A Hundred Million Suns

As a Northern Irishman, I always feel a faint hint of pride when I listen to Snow Patrol or see them gain chart recognition, as, despite their frequent mediocrity, they’ve come from being a fairly terrible student band playing universities up and down the British Isles to become well, massive....
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Posted Jan. 6, 2009
Music

Panama Kings

On a massively cold December evening I took the trek up to Birmingham to see some of the fastest rising stars in the spiraling galaxy of music that is now Belfast: Panama Kings, supporting Dodgy, the one-time Glastonbury crowd-pleasers turned middle-aged booze-rockers, at an unbelievably Baltic Barfly, expecting to be...
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Posted Jan. 6, 2009