MAY 23rd 2012 CIARAFEST PRESENTS JOHNNY DOWD AND THE HAVENOTS
£8 ADVANCE
TICKETS FROM http://www.wegottickets.com/event/161512
A first for Ciarafest, we have Texan guitar-slinger and dark, musical visionary Johnny Dowd playing the first UK date of his European tour for us.
"If Willie Nelson turned into Mr. Hyde, he'd be Johnny Dowd. Backwoods gothic tales of love, death, and a perverse God arrive with a twang and a junkyard clatter, reaching for laughs that grow uneasy."
Jon Pareles, New York Times
"With his lean, mean, funky songs about drinking, religion and wheelchairs, Mr. Dowd comes across like Johnny Cash reinvented by Quentin Tarantino. Nasty."
Nuts
"There's intense and there's Johnny Dowd. He's Nick Cave with a hangover. Hank's lonesome whistle spat through Waits's grinder, with Beefheart on the side, coming on like a flu-ridden Texan undertaker singing broken folk laments for a dead dog he never cared much for anyway."
Peter Watts, Time Out London
"Johnny Dowd is like some self-mutating virus of American music, restlessly bringing fresh twists to old forms, absorbing influences."
The Independent (London)
"There's nobody quite like Johnny Dowd, a dapper 60-year-old Texan absurdist who recorded his first album 10 years ago. . . . like Charles Bukowski backed by a jazz-country funk shuffle. It's really quite brilliant, putting to shame artists half his age."
Peter Shepherd, Uncut
Liam Dullaghan, who stole the show at the last Ciarafest will be reuniting The Havenots for their first show in over two years!
"He does sadness so well, I think he might actually be enjoying it. I am"
Alan Moore
"a wonderfully forlorn solo debut - loneliness never sounded so good"
ForFolksSake
"a beautiful and remarkable solo debut"
Americana-uk
"Liam Dullaghan's debut solo album is a tender 3am kind of record that signals the arrival of a very exciting new talent….this is a record that never runs out of ideas"
Guitarist Magazine
"Making History is a marvellous slab of hushed Americana"
Sunday Express
"a splendid record full of achingly pretty moments"
The Guardian
"an amalgam of the joys of The Replacements, Teenage Fanclub, Pernice Brothers and Big Star. Think sweet Americana fused with power pop and you're halfway there. Think one of the best records of its type to pass this way in an age"
The Irish Times
"If the devil has all the good music then at least one angel stands amongst them. File alongside Iain Archer, Grant Lee Phillips and Elliot Smith"
Crud magazine
Ciarafest hits £7.5k
Just a quick note to say that, including Ciarafest 14, we have now handed in cheques to Premrose (the charity that raises funds to buy equipment for the Rosey Maternity Ward at Adenbrooke's Hospital) totalling £7,667. We'd like to take this opportunity to again thank everyone who participates in any way - from the bands who perform for free to the punters who pay to come and see them, or just pay - and have helped make the Ciarafest nights so special. Cheers!
Now buy a T-shirt!
If you have a Facebook account, head over and join the Ciarafest group for pics, gossip and to put some names to those Ciarafest faces.
Ciarafest T-shirts
The first batch of limited edition Ciarafest T-shirts are now on sale, and they are just ?0 - a blinking bargain, as it has a front and back print (see above) and comes in black, Superman blue and red (and all sorts of strange sizes too). If you want one but can't make the gig, email us and we'll sort something out, although don't go promising your long lost relative in Outer Mongolia one in time for Christmas!
Ciarafest.co.uk Is Here!
Hi, and welcome to the Ciarafest website. There's not an awful lot up here yet, but keep checking back for more content and news of Ciarafest related stuff. Rest assured, Ciarafest 11 will be along in 2008, but no details have been confirmed - they'll be on this page first as soon as they are. In the meantime, if you're in a band and want to play, send us an email; just bear in mind it's a 100 capacity venue in Cambridge and we won't pay you (although we'll buy you a pint) - can't say fairer than that! Famous people welcome - we're not snobs.
If you've somehow arrived here without knowing what Ciarafest is, or want more information on what we do and why we do it, have a look at the 'About Us' section, which should fill in all the blanks. If it doesn't, feel free to email us at ciara@ciarafest.co.uk. Also, there is a full list of previous Ciarafests in the 'Events' section.
Finally, if you have anything Ciarafest related on your site, let us know and we'll link to it or something clever like that. Again, email us and we'll get onto it in our own sweet time. To start things off, here's a lil' Q&A that The Explorer did with yours truly: http://www.explorermagazine.co.uk/magazines/24/whatson/