PIERCE IN THE PARLOUR

THE award-winning musician Pierce Turner is giving a home town Parlour Performance upstairs in Mackens in the Bullring on Thursday, August 24 with tickets at €22 each on sale at Wexford Arts Centre.

The venue has a capacity of 45 so it will be a special gig for those lucky enough to be in attendance and the audience will get up close and personal with the man once described by an Irish Times music critic as ‘Easily one of the most important Irish artists of the last twenty years’.

Pierce who emigrated to New York many moons ago with fellow Wexford musician Larry Kirwan as part of Turner and Kirwan and later The Major Thinkers, made his first solo album ‘It’s Only A Long Way Across’ for the English label Beggars Banquet Records in 1987 and it was later signed by BMG Records in America.

He enjoyed the limelight at Glastonbury where he was introduced by headliner Suzanne Vega and when his third album ‘Now Is Heaven’ came out, he was voted solo performer of the year in Ireland at the Hot Press Awards in a field with Sinead O’Connor and Christy Moore.

He began recording for his own label and performing live with a string quartet leading to an album called Manana in Manhattan Live and making it on to the cover of New York Magazine as ‘one of the city’s great undiscovered gems’. The avant garde composer Philip Glass invited him to perform at Carnegie Hall at a benefit show with Iggy Pop and patti Smith on the bill.

Now 61, Pierce has been performing music in public since he was seven years old as part of an Irish tin whistle group and a singer in his local church choir. He has produced 13 albums and his unfaded passion for music sees him continuing to regularly perform throughout Ireland and New York.