The Gathering

Last Wednesday classes were canceled for the first time in NUIM history, as all my teachers were glad to complain about, for an 11 hour concert called The Gathering. http://www.thegatheringfestival.ie/day.php It was part of RAG week, which is raise and give week, though it is more like Spring Break, only they just drink all day for a week at school. People came in for it from other universities and other towns. The pubs closed their doors about 10pm because they could not fit any more people in. That almost never happens. In the past for RAG week, the student union would put on events every day for the students and the profits would go to charity. There were events like bungee jumping and paintball. To encourage people to not drink so much and attend classes this year, the SU decided to concentrate all the activities on one day for this concert. There were two stages and 15 bands/acts. I made it to six of the bands. It was a FUN day. It started with the best and then got progressively worse or maybe I just got progressively more tired, both are entirely plausible. My roommates started the day at noon, drinking two bottles of wine each by 2pm. Needless to say, they were drunk. We got to the concert about a half hour early in order to get a good front place to stand to see The Coronas. I was front and center! It was great. I was next to two St. Mary's girls who were OBSESSED with them. They were the typical screaming girls from Backstreet Boys concerts. Occasionally, the lead singer would look down at us and boy, would they scream. Well in all fairness, I was pleased also, but just on the inside. Here is a performance of theirs from the O2 music awards where they won something for this song. They did not have all the lights for the show, but it was still really neat!


Next we had Duke Special, who was very weird but I thought that I would give him a chance because others liked him. I decided to leave after the song "I'm diggin my grave." No need to say more.

Then Mundy came on, who was pretty good and sang some famous Irish-y songs, though he was rather bitter about it. Everyone just wanted to hear Galway Girl. Two guys behind me started chanting in between songs and he got kinda mad at them. His newer stuff, I did not know, but that was normal because all the acts were Irish or European and have not made it to the states. Here he is playing Galway Girl.


In between all the acts, everyone went back to the apartment and drank some more. We had a messy, messy apartment that day. I came back from one of the acts to find about 20 beer bottles smashed on our kitchen floor. Well, they cleaned it up by 11am the next day so I had no problem with it. When one of the boys broke our broom, I got a little peeved. When I took it away from him, he told me, "Liz, I both hate you and love you." I didn't ask what that meant.
Here is The View. They were okay.


My roommates collect posters to decorate our apartment. On the way back from one of the acts we went through the arts building, which is the clubs and societies spot for advertising and was deserted due to classes being canceled, and collected some good posters. One of them was for a "marathong," which was a 5k that you run in your "tighty-whities." Hilarious! We also collected a large wooden stake about as big as me and another orange construction cone. Oh our apartment.
Here are the Magic Numbers, who were good. They had some natural talent, especially the girls. They are two sets of brother and sister's. It was cool to see them just playing for the fun of it and not for the fans.


Finally was Sidney Samson, who was worked up to be AMAZING by some friends of mine. A let down to say the least. He is a DJ so he just stood up at the front mixing music and was good but most of my friends were not there because it was a long day. I ended up being smashed up against the front gate by adoring drunken people. Oh well. His one famous song is fun because everyone goes crazy when it comes on here. Don't watch it if you don't like a little bit of cursing. The video is actually pretty funny if you watch it all the way through.

In conclusion, The Gathering was quite fun and worth my 30 euro. I did not know any of the bands so I really did not know what to expect. The SU expected to sell 5000 tickets and needed to sell 3000 to break even. I think that they sold about 900. This was a letdown because with a pretty empty tent, the energy was low, but on the bright side, I was able to get very close to the bands every time!