After seven years of supposed break ups, rumoured releases, and generally lying low, Massive Attack released their fifth studio album, and after fearing the worst, State can confirm it’s an early runner for album of the year. There’s collaborations with Damon Albarn (whose home studio they also recorded in), Martina Topley Bird, Guy Garvey…

Smoke fills the room, sweat drips from every forehead, stray bikers wonder what’s going on and Scary Éire rule everything in their sights. Get into it or make your way back outside into the pissing rain on Ca-pel Street. The concrete floor and indescribable sheeting used on the walls can barely be seen at…

At this stage most of us have seen some unlikely hero dance their way through ‘Bonkers’. Be it the drunk in the corner of your local who found some last embers of energy to move to it or even, as State bore witness to at a wedding this summer, several folks aged 50-plus havin…

It’s not difficult to see why Joel Conroy’s at times disjointed surfing documentary has won so many fans in the last year. The shots of surfers making light of four-storey high waves in the shadow of the Cliffs of Moher and elsewhere provides jaw dropping entertainment, while the protagonists are a great mix of…

“I’ll wrap this up nice and pretty for you,” says the massive frame of The Sugarhill Gang’s Wonder Mike, “I left Sugar Hill Records so that I could buy a hot dog. I didn’t like the way of working, I’ll be that succinct.” State hadn’t realised just how touchy a subject the band’s former…

Considering the well-trodden choice of those heading down the biopic route is to smooth out the rough edges of the main subject, it’s a testament to director Anne Fontaine’s faith in Audrey Tatou’s innate likeability that she allows her to portray Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel as a generally moody, often unsympathetic loner in this beautifully…

After much of the good work from the third and fourth instalments of the Harry Potter franchise was undone by the bloated, forgettable Order of the Phoenix, there is a huge sense of something to prove in the sixth outing for the scarred chosen one. Alfonso Cuarón and then Mike Newell not only gave…

The Horrors are moored somewhere along the Thames and the band’s sometime bassist, sometime keyboard player and all-round Timotei convert Rhys ‘Spider’ Webb has wandered up on deck to talk to State. “We’re playing a gig on a boat, there’s no mobile reception below deck,” he explains before ruining his nautical knowledge façade by…

“I never said I was deep, but I am profoundly shallow,” and so goes one of the many fine lines from Jarvis Branson Cocker on his shockingly well-humoured sophomore solo album. Beginning with a triumvirate of riff-heavy rock tunes – the title track, ‘Angela’ and ‘Pilchard’ – even those with a pretty well seasoned…

About a decade ago Edmund Enright sat in the London office of his lawyer and was told the best thing for him to do would be to kill off Mundy. “Tarnished” was how the guy at the other side of the desk described the pseudonym of the Birr native, who had just been dropped…

Having seemingly dropped out of the sky in the last few months, 202s are Mike Glennon and Steve Melling, a duo who spent the guts of the noughties in regular rock bands but who found themselves drawn more and more towards synths, loops and krautrock as time went on. Two years ago they began…

Fittingly for a man with a name worthy of a superhero alter ego, the majority of Dan Deacon’s often brilliant but ultimately frustrating Bromst has the frenetic energy of Batman kicking seven shades of shit out of hired goons. An energy-sapping experience; when Bromst lets the tempo run a little smoother for a few…

“It’s like, you want a song about givin’ a girl a better life or you want a song about how good her dick suckin’ is?” It’s a conundrum that has T-Pain thinking today and a question that he feels the general public has to ask themselves.
Upstairs in Tripod’s main dressing room, one of…

Screw trying to confuse people over the course of an album, the at-times batshit crazy Cork powerhouse Áine Duffy instead tries to wrong-step listeners around every verse, chorus and curiously meandering guitar line on her debut record. As obsessed with the dramatics of a song as Jack Lukeman was a decade before her, Duffy…