Sunday 03th May 2026
Location: BILLY BYRNE’S (Roots Festival 2026)
Seamus Fogarty returns to The Kilkenny Rhythm & Roots for the first time since 2018, with a full band and a brand new album in tow. Packed with poignant and funny slice-of-life vignettes touching on love, loss, DIY coffins, cans on trains with strangers and so much more, Ships is his most expansive and uplifting collection of music to date. Following up a number of critically-acclaimed albums released on Domino Records is no easy task and with that in mind Seamus enlisted the help of a range of esteemed collaborators, old and new, to bring this new collection of songs to life, including string-arranger and multi-instrumentalist Emma Smith (Pulp, Beth Gibbons), drummers Chris Vatalaro (Anohni, Radiohead) and Aram Zarikian (Grasscut), and horns player Joe Auckland (Madness, Oasis), Additional production and engineering comes from by Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins) and Mike Lindsay (Tunng, Lump). His live show are equally ambitious and his set at The Roots back in 2018 is still talked about in glowing terms. This year alone he’s opened two massive shows for Portishead’s Beth Gibbons in London’s Roundhouse & Luxembourg’s Neumünster Abbey and shared the stage with Mike Heron in The Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank as part of an all-star band assembled to celebrate the music of The Incredible String Band. He has toured extensively around the UK, Ireland & Europe and has also appeared at many notable festivals including the main stage of Green Man, Eurosonic, Latitude, Electric Picnic, Cambridge Folk, Mosely Folk & Haldern Pop. He has also appeared on Other Voices and recorded live sessions for Mark Radcliffe on on BBC Radio 2 and Cerys Matthews on BBC 6Music. Seamus Fogarty hails from County Mayo in the west of Ireland, and was raised on Irish folk music and experimental electronica. His songs are a strange and hearty stew, taking traditional structures and compositions and amping up, warping, distorting, and misshaping them with layers of electronic dissonance and interference, found-sound spoken-word samples and other assorted rogue audio curio. “I began playing the tin whistle when I was four ,” says Seamus, “took up the guitar when I was ten, learning all of the album Use Your Illusion 2 by Guns N’ Roses off by heart. From there I moved on to Smog, Palace Brothers and John Fahey before leaning back into the Irish folk music of my youth and devouring my parent’s collection of early Autechre records.”
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