Castlepalooza Festival
This little gem has raised the Irish festival bar exceptionally high
Celina Murphy, 12 Aug 2010
It’s about 5pm in Tullamore. A 74-year old gentleman in tweed is propositioning me in the turret of Charleville Castle, but a pair of irresistibly bonny toddlers are giving me the cold shoulder. No less than three free hats have been slapped on my head and I’ve already stepped on two unidentifiable figures rolling joyously around in a mud puddle – at their request, naturally. I’ve been at Castlepalooza for about 20 minutes.
But random acts of mayhem or no random acts of mayhem; there’s music to be heard. Billed as the ultimate '90s experience, Attention Bébé use vocals, guitars, a full brass and string section and a couple of sign-wielding dancers to recreate everything from Craig David’s ‘Rewind’ to Gala’s ‘Free From Desire’. This is not just a cover band. This is a dirty, funky, freak-out cover band.
Over on the main stage, power rockers CODES are sounding as delightfully grandiose as ever (special props to frontman Daragh Anderson for attacking several crowd members with his guitar), while a short but stirring set by Funeral Suits marks the instrument-hopping trio as new age electro merchants to rival the likes of Passion Pit and Delphic.
Regular Hot Press readers will be accustomed to reports of the guitar-fueled wizardry of The Cast Of Cheers, which is lucky because I can’t concentrate on the brain-busting robot rock for more than three minutes without some punter tugging on my sleeve and asking for the names of these mesmerising gents. Whatever the Dublin foursome are doing up there (next time I’m springing for a t-shirt with their MySpace address on it!), the gyrating tunesters have inspired the happiest crowd of the weekend.
This is only instrumental legends Adebisi Shank’s second Irish gig in almost eight months and it’s quite a change from their last show, which saw them thrill 300 die-hards in the sweaty confines of Dublin’s Twisted Pepper. Totally unfazed, the mind-boggling trio are blowing minds and presumably, breaking a few bones on the ‘Palooza stage with an impossibly tight and ecstatically possessed performance that mixes the frantic old with the spellbinding new.
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