Leonard Cohen is set to play an outdoor seated show in Dublin in June. The venue for Cohen's first Irish show in two decades is believed to be the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham.
Last week, POD Concerts applied to Dublin City Council for planning permission to hold live shows at this location between June 13th and 20th, with "up to 12,000 people" expected to attend.
POD Concerts held the Some Days Never End festival, featuring Kíla, The Frames, Pet Shop Boys and others, at the same venue last autumn.
On The Record understands that Iggy Pop will also be headlining a show at the venue on June 16th with support from The Kills and Stiff Little Fingers.
When contacted by The Ticket to confirm details of acts scheduled to be playing this series of shows at the Royal Hospital, a spokesman for POD Concerts declined to comment.
Cohen's last Irish concerts were in June 1988, when he played two shows at Dublin's National Stadium. The influential 73-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter is due to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 10th in New York.
Cohen is expected to announce a full US, Canadian and European tour, his first in 15 years, in the coming weeks.
He has already been confirmed as one of the headliners for this summer's Glastonbury Festival and is also expected to play a run of shows at London's O2 Arena.
Cohen is believed to be working on a new album, the follow-up to 2004's Dear Heather, which may be released later this year.
Last June, in an interview with HARP magazine, Cohen admitted he had "an itch" to tour again.
"I haven't been out since '93. The years went by and I thought 'I'll never go out again.' But every so often you do have that itch. The actual concerts are always compelling. If you've got good musicians, and you're playing, and people know the songs, and they want to hear them live, it is a wonderful thing. And so I'm drawn to that."
Soundtracks on the Lee
There's a sizeable musical element to this year's Cork French Film Festival (Reel News has more details).
This includes Cine- Concerts with Dublin ensemble 3epkano providing a score for a screening of Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House Of Usher (Triskel, March 3rd) and Somadrone supplying the soundtrack for Chris Marker's La Jetée (Triskel, March 6th).
The festival's closing party (Triskel, March 7th) will feature live sets from the excellent Cap Pas Cap and the Matalking duo, with local record shop owner Jim Plugd on the decks. More information from www.corkfrenchfilm festival.com
Getting out of the boy band ghetto
Believe it or not, there is musical life after a spell in a boy band.
Mark Sheehan and Danny O'Donoghue are former members of My Town, the Irish boy band who signed a huge record deal in the 1990s and released a debut album co-produced by Teddy Riley, but who failed to set the world alight.
Sheehan and O'Donoghue, along with Glen Power, are now The Script, a band signed to RCA Records who are receiving a lot of attention thanks to their We Cry track, with BBC Radio 1 and music industry magazine Record of the Day tipping the band for bigger things.
The Script are currently touring Britain supporting The Hoosiers.
