This year, the Liverpool Irish Festival will be running a special event called Visible Women. The event takes place on the evening of Wednesday 23rd October as part of the festival’s programme to celebrate women and to share their stories.
They’ve chosen three unique and gifted female singers, namely Lisa O’Neill, Maz O’Connor and Laura Duff. They told us “It’s also really important for us to put artists together at different stages of their career.”
Lisa O’Neill should need no introduction following the giant waves made by her latest album Heard a Long Gone Song which has seen her shortlisted for several BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including Best Album, Folk Singer of the Year, best original track for ‘Blackbird’ and best traditional track for ‘Factory Girl’. To top this her festival appearances have been going down as the most memorable. In his review of Cambridge Folk Festival, Folk Radio’s Danny Neill said:
“I’ll nail my colours to the mast right now and state categorically that this was my outstanding highlight of the whole weekend. Every ounce of natural ability and empathy for the material I heard on last years ‘Heard A Long Gone Song’ was on display right in front of me, just as I’d hoped… The whole set left me believing that I’d just seen proper, hardcore, traditional folk music played in its purest form by an artist who could easily create some of folks most important work of the 21st century. People, get right with Lisa O’Neill immediately.”
Likewise, Maz O’Connor is no stranger to these pages, she has a new album out on October 25th, just two days after this gig. We recently shared her new video for the lead single San Francisco. In the accompanying press for the single we’re told that “The seeds of Chosen Daughter were sown in a chance conversation Maz had with her mother as they watched the film ‘Philomena’ (about a woman’s search for her forcibly adopted son in Ireland), which revealed that her mum had been adopted from a Catholic “mother and baby” home run by nuns. Her mum’s birth mother had been an Irish domestic servant in England when she fell pregnant. Her story inspired ‘Predator’ and ‘Finer than I’ on the new album.”
And finally, Laura Duff is an artist from Limerick whose sound is inspired by the likes of Daughter, Ben Howard and Lucy Rose. Her debut single is ‘Up to You’. She won the 2015 Paul Clancy Young Songwriter Award.
The evening will be hosted by bilingual spoken word artist and broadcaster Ciara Ní É.
For more details and tickets, visit: https://www.liverpoolirishfestival.com/events/visible-women-2/