Falls Festival launches their Foster a Band Competition this week with local media outlets in competition to push an act that they want to see play at the Byron event over New Year.
So basically I have to convince you to vote for the act I have chosen, Aine Tyrell. You can vote here
Sure I’m a little biased. She’s become one of my closest friends. Ever since Brian Nankervis failed to show for an On the Couch session at Bello Winter Music and I had to step into his place and interview her. Here was this wild-haired Irish single mum of three who had fled domestic violence by buying a bus and then driving into the desert to make her Queen of Swords album – she was like a mythic feminist superhero. A woman who rescued herself and then made an extraordinarily powerful album. Wow, what’s not to love about that?
Aine is the role model that young women need. She’s all about doing it on your own terms. She’s not a hot-pants-wearing gyrating pop diva; she’s a feet-in-the-earth banshee call to action.
She might live locally but Irish-born Aine Tyrell is truly an international act. Just last year she took her family across Europe playing festivals across the continent all the way back to Ireland, where her single Don’t Be Left Crying climbed to Number One on Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE’s Independent Music Charts. While she was in Ireland she was joined by her producer Mark Stanley to record Return to the Sea, a musical homecoming that saw Tyrell return to the places and people that made her, including her father Sean Tyrell, one of Ireland’s most revered and enduring folk singers.
See this picture of Aine and me? Well that’s her and me on stage in the Vagina Conversations. I’m playing harmonica on her vagina. Well it’s a harmonica that’s strapped around her waist so to the audience it looks like I’m playing her pussy.
Why? Because she’s singing a song called My Pussy Belongs to Jesus, a slightly altered version of Bird Cloud’s Saving Myself for Jesus. This was performed in reference to the Irish referendum leading up to the repeal of the amendment of the constitution to give women the right to choose safe and legal abortions in their home country. Aine stayed up online for two nights during the referendum to help push the conversation… and when that YES vote came back she was in tears, moved by the power of solidarity across the waves!
There’s something of the Joan of Arc about Aine Tyrell. She’s a fierce advocate for finding parity for women onstage in the music industry. She’s courageous. She’s earthy. She’s unafraid. As a proudly Irish girl who knows what it’s like for colonials to take your country, she’s a fierce advocate for an Indigenous treaty in Australia. Her newest single In this House is an harmonious artwork that celebrates the diversity and harmony of stories common to Australia and Ireland.
Voting is open, so please go online and choose Aine Tyrell! https://fallsfestival.com/byron-bay/goings-on/foster-a-band/
Besides, she’ll be the only act at Falls with a truly musical twat.
HOw do we vote for Aine?