Best music festival in Ireland! Kilkenny Roots Festival

Driving into the sunset to the Kilkenny Roots Festival

The Kilkenny Roots Festival has got to be one of the very best places to hear great musicians, see them up close in atmospheric venues, and buzz with the eclectic crowd of festival goers-- in short, have the craic. And for not much money! About half of the gigs are free, & the rest generally cost between €10-€20-- recession busting at its finest.

John Cleere has been organising the festival for years, and has a keen ear/eye for quality acts. One of the big scoops this year was Alabama Shakes, and seeing them live at the Set Theatre I realized that they are without a doubt a band that should be experienced live. So get their CD/download/vinyl, but also SEE THEM LIVE! Here's a taster of them doing a song you likely best know as performed by Led Zeppelin

Imagine it live-- it was fabulous!

Truthfully they rocked so hard my faithful Galaxy S2 couldn't handle the louder bits and the sound went very distorted,- thus the more subdued clip :-)

On the gentler side of things, we also saw the wonderful Amanda Shires, twice! Now, I say gentler, but she has a song about murdering her lover- have a listen: 

This is not my video, BTW- not trying to take credit :-) Plus, in this video there is added Rod Picott for your listening pleasure! He was at the KKRoots, too, but we didn't get to his own gig. We didn't get to lots of the gigs, but plan to take time off to do so next year-- you should think about it, too--drive off into the sunset and spend a golden 3 day weekend in Kilkenny!
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PS: check out this for tips on where to eat in Kilkenny! For newspaper articles on the 2012 festival see this one, where an artist declares he's in love with Kilkenny. He's not alone, in this article, musician & writer Willy Vlautin tells about his experience of the festival.  Head to Kilkenny next time & find out for yourself! :-)
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