IF YOU’RE KICKING your heels for something to do in Dublin tomorrow you could do a lot worse than checking out the city’s first Busker Fleadh.
Street performance is something that Dublin is pretty much synonymous with, and the Fleadh, which will run in conjunction with the Smithfield Stoneybatter Food Festival, is set to showcase the best of it, in the organisers’ own words.
The Fleadh is being brought to us by Dublin City Council (DCC), with Lord Mayor Brendan Carr saying the event will bring us the best of the city’s “vibrant music scene”.
Apart from bringing the cream of Ireland’s buskers together for a few short hours at Smithfield Square (the Fleadh kicks off at 12 noon and quits at 5pm), there will be quite a deal of other stuff to contend with.
“There’ll be lots of food stalls and the High Hopes Choir will be on the scene as well,” says Fleadh organiser Kathryn Byrne.
Street performers from the Dublin Circus Project will be on hand, there’ll be a special screening of Irish comedy-drama Sing Street in the Lighthouse Cinema, and the whole thing will be topped off with the Dublin Busker Competition.
So there’s something in it for everyone.
The winner(s) of the Busker Competition will be gifted recording time at Windmill Lane Recording Studios and a digital download of their recordings worth €1,000.
20 acts came through an open call to perform at the event, which will see four running through their sets each hour around the square. One of those is Wexford two-handers The Scenarios, made up of Thomas Furlong and William Carley.
“We formed about a year and a half ago while we were both up in St Pat’s,” the pair told TheJournal.ie. “We started practicing together to try and raise money for a charity skydive – that went well so we stuck with it.”
The two are an acoustic band, with both providing vocals, guitars, and, less expectedly, a ukulele. They picked up on a Facebook ad for the Fleadh a couple of months ago, just a number of weeks after they started gigging seriously.
“We hope we’re in with a shout anyway,” Thomas says of the Busker Competition.
We played a wedding last night, but we’ll be up fresh and early for the contest, and we’ll give it our best.
Everyone seems to be very excited for the event in truth, with Kathryn Byrne affirming that all those involved can’t wait for it to begin.
“We’re bursting with excitement for this, we’ve been talking about this for two years and now it’s time to go,” she says.
It should be a perfect event really, good food, good music, plenty to keep small people entertained (samba drumming workshops being just one), it’ll be a day out for everybody.
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