I have noticed this recently alright. Loads of acts ive wanted to see seem to have skipped us.... Great Lake Swimmers The White Stripes Richard Hawley Wilco/Jeff Tweedy and more I can't remember right now, strange.

its something that has sometimes puzzled me too. a lot of the time it is down to dates not been available and stuff. sometimes its down to promoters here not knowing who the bands are - remember we are dealing with people here who stuck someone like Manu Chao into Whelans when he rammed the Point. i think its changing, though. Look at Jack Johnson. The show has now been moved to the Point because the promoters were caught on the hop by the tickets selling out so fast. What about a list of acts that promoters SHOULD bring over here? I'd love to see: Death Cab for Cutie Jon Brion (great piece on him in todays Ticket) Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate Whitey Animal Collective Sure theres more people can add to that list.....

I think a lot of this is to do with the way bands tour the UK these days. Or more to the point, don't tour the UK that much anymore. A lot of acts seems to lad in London, play a few gigs and hop on the Eurostar to Paris and hit Europe.

clap your hands say yeah were another band that were touring all england scotland wales (i think) even fitted in a date in iceland but we were passed over....such a shame although given the wealth of music in the city over the last month, i'm loathe to complain to vocally

a bit more mainstream but i noticed kasabian have yet to play in a venue in Ireland, apart of course from oxygen. Yet they have being touring relentlessly around the rest of the world!

I was thinkin about kasabian meself. Have they played in ireland yet bar the festivals?

the bigger promoters (mcd, Aiken) are c**ts and unwilling to take a risk on a band they don't know. the smaller guys (u:mack, lazybird, ) have a limited budgets and have to pick and choose. the real reason tho is that ireland is just too small for every band to tour here.

Bear in mind, touring is as much about selling records as it is about playing music. I can think of two acts recently, gretchen wilson and pat green, where playing here was pointless since they don't sell records (pat green's aren't even available) here and subsequently didn't sell tickets. Jack Johnson has been moved because there is now something like 4,500 surfers in ireland - I don't know how they count us, is there some kind of census going on ? - and jacko is a big deal in surfing circles as, a) a surfer b) a maker of surf movies and c) a creator of chilled post surf tunes. His gig was a hot topic on surf discussion boards for months so, dudes, its the waveriding underground that helped put him in the point. As for White Stripes, who cares, they are pants live and everywhere else.

didn't Kasabian play the Ambassador? Maybe I made that up. It's weird that we probably have the largest market for live gigs (and BIG bigs) in Europe, yet some bands avoid us. It's probably something to do with 'market awareness', which record companies are generally quite s**te at when it comes to playing live. Anyway, most of the bands I would like to see here - DCFC, and loads of emo and stuff, well, frankly, I imagine that they mightn't draw very big crowds. Irish audiences aren't exactly on the pulse of things as say, in London. Plus, our population is so much smaller, that it really can't contain the amount of live shows that another country might sustain. Look at Chemical Brothers, Franz Ferdinand etc this year, they didn't even sell out. Now, I know that might be something to do with timing etc, but still. And look at the amount of foreign acts that Crawdaddy has cut down on - great acts, but they just weren't getting the punters in. The trend with other promoters is to bring the same acts back again and again; they know they'll do well until the interest is exhausted.

oh yeah, and Whitey did play Whelans. Pity none of the indie heads knew who he was until the Bloc Party remix surfaced. D'oh.

With regard to the smaller acts, the promoter may be able to afford the bands basic fee, the advertising costs and the cost of renting the venue. However their are additional expenses such as transport and accommodation for the band members, their manager, their sound engineer and their road crew which can leave the possibility of a solo Irish gig financially unfeasible. As a result promoters typically try and knock together a four date tour so that they can negotiate a lower fee and split the transport costs four ways. The problem lies in getting promoters outside of Dublin to take on these gigs. I don't know how Husky Rescue and the Duke Spirit got on in Dublin back in June but they both bombed in Galway. Both gigs attracted less than 50 paying customers and as a result the promoter that put them on is very sceptical of putting on any more expensive gigs. I'm sure promoters in Cork and Limerick have similar stories.

It's not just a Dublin thing, so no need to be paranoid, all you Dubs! More or less the same pattern of gigs exists in Paris; lots of up-and-coming or cult bands with fanbases are booked to play the festivals and then if the album sells well and a walk-up/word-of-mouth audience seems likely they'll get a Euro tour with all the big stops. Most of the same acts that play Dublin also play Paris - or 'don't play', as the case may be. Arcade Fire haven't played a concert on their own in Paris, for example - they were on the bill of the 'Rock en Seine' festival. It seems that everyone heads to London and all other countries and cities are an afterthought. Imagine if you lived in Luxembourg - no gigs at all!!!! (but a cracking jazz scene, I'm told) It reminds me of the story that (until the '90s) Sinatra didn't perform in Ireland because he didn't want to be seen to be taking money from a third-world country.... perhaps Jack White heard about the Irish health system and came to a similar conclusion...

i also think it might have something to do with the amount of people in the other european cities for example london has about 11 million people in it compared to dublins one million. so promoters are able to book bands and know that they can fill the venues.

But that doesn't make sense when you see some of the hokey towns in the UK that bands play.

yes it does. Because people in hokey towns in Ireland just want Paddy Casey to come every second week.

have to say, while i agree with many of the points relating to why some bands don't make it over to ireland, i think you're all being a bit harsh expecting every band to make it over... as far as i can see, 2004 has been an amazing year for gigs in dublin - we're very lucky... and we're in a considerably healthier state than we were just a few years ago... ...and clap your hands say yeah and broken social scene have just announced dublin gigs for february so that's great (and unforseen) news for me

Why do Depeche Mode never play Ireland? I can't remember them ever playing here. Do they hate us Paddies? And what about about Pink Floyd? Come on over lads, we won't bite yis>