Sam Fender, Sigrid, Villagers, Fontaines D.C., Little Simz, Dermot Kennedy and more will feature in ‘Ireland’s Greatest Small Music Festival: Other Voices’ on BBC Four.
Tonight, to honour twenty years of Other Voices, BBC 4 will broadcast a sixty-minute special film celebrating the history and foundations of Ireland’s most internationally acclaimed music festival and television series.
Over twenty years, Other Voices has become a glorious celebration of music in all its diversity. From its beginnings as an intimate musical gathering in a tiny church in Dingle, Ireland’s iconic festival has hosted a series of global events in Austin, London, Belfast, Berlin, Derry, New York with a further 35 million people experiencing the festival online. The digital Other Voices Courage series gained over 2.5 million views in 2020, bringing live music safely back into people’s lives with performances from Fontaines D.C., Lankum, Denise Chaila, The Murder Capital, James Vincent McMorrow, Kodaline, Lisa Hannigan and more.
Presented by renowned Irish broadcaster and former BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Macmanus, the special film will feature new performances from Sam Fender, Sigrid, Orla Gartland, Dermot Kennedy, Villagers, Kay Young and John Grant and will include never-before-seen conversations with some of music’s brightest stars.
These extraordinary intimate performances were captured in the tiny Church of St James in Dingle last November as part of Other Voices’ twentieth-anniversary celebrations.
Ireland’s Greatest Small Music Festival: Other Voices’ will also open the Other Voices vault, sharing some remarkable archive performances from the past two decades including legendary sets from BRIT award winning Little Simz, Mercury Prize award winner Arlo Parks and an iconic ‘Courage’ performance by the Grammy nominated Fontaines D.C. who release their highly anticipated third album ‘Skinty Fia’ this April.
This sixty-minute film will be broadcast on BBC 4 on Friday 18 March at 10pm and comes ahead of the transmission of the twentieth series of Other Voices which hits RTÉ 2 later this Spring.
Annie Macmanus, Other Voices Presenter , said: “Other Voices is communion. It is the rhythm and flow of a long conversation. It is the surprise of a tear running down a cheek. It is songs carrying us away and then bringing us back to each other. That is the heart of the matter.”
Philip King, Director of Other Voices, said: “It has been so exciting to produce this film for the BBC and share some magical musical moments located in the Church of St James, in the town of Dingle in one of the most spectacular and beautiful landscapes in western Europe.”
Rachel Davies, Commissioning Editor for BBC Music, said: “I’m delighted to bring this wonderful festival to a UK television audience. There is something very special about Other Voices, the town of Dingle and the church of St James that hopefully we have captured in the programme. It’s that magic which has kept this tiny festival at the top of the agenda and a must play for artists across the UK and Ireland for the past twenty years.”
