your irish music video of the year is...

RÓIS x hhH's "Did Ye Ever Get The Ride At The Wake-House?" directed by Adam O'Reilly takes the prize at the Kerry International Film Festival

It's actually filmed in Kerry, so the circle of life goes on. From RÓIS x hhH's "Did Ye Ever Get The Ride At The Wake-House?" directed by Adam O'Reilly

The Fourth Best Agenda is alive and well in The Kingdom.

When I was invited to curate a set of the best Irish music videos of the year to send to the Kerry International Film Festival, to be judged by Dawn Shadforth — by the woman who Wikipedia tells me "insisted Kylie Minogue wear gold hotpants" in one of the most iconic pop videos of my youth — did you think I'd say no? Did you think I wouldn't obsess over this as though it was the most important thing this website would ever do? Did you think there wouldn't be spreadsheets, test screenings, agonising decisions? My favourite video from last year took top honours at last year's awards, so I wanted to make sure we could say the same this year, but most of all I saw a window to do the coolest thing ever. I'm thrilled to say this weekend proved me right. Before we get to the result though, some thoughts on infrastructure. It's the Fourth Best Agenda, after all.

Music videos are an underappreciated art. They start filmmaking careers — Spike Jonze and David Fincher being my go-to examples — and allow the best zero-budget work to sit alongside teams spending tens of thousands. In this selection, one editor mentioned downloading green-screen VFX from YouTube and compositing them in iMovie. It still absolutely hit in the room.

This is almost entirely independent art. Depending on how you count it, there was a major label involved in one or none of them. And so, many of these videos are sitting on YouTube with criminally small view numbers. I don't think the filmmakers mind. In fact, since closing the window for this year's awards, many of them have already went on to put out better work already!

Our state broadcaster doesn't play music videos, despite me hearing from many people a little older than me that their taste in alternative music emerged from seeing RTÉ 2 feature one from time to time, often adjacent to children's programming. I think there's a huge, unaddressed opportunity to bring this art in front of people. Max Alper, one of the biggest influences on this website, often says "Music is social, so be social." I wanted this screening to feel a bit like just coming to my gaff, sitting on my couch, and watching me pull some stuff from YouTube like "have you seen this?". In fact, doing that is what shaped the running order and helped me to choose between multiple videos from the same artist and/or director. And the event itself was just fun I intend to run this screening again before next year's KIFF.

From *Landlord's Demise* by The Mary Wallopers directed by Sean McMahon. Two different videos in this year's programme focused on imagery of dereliction and decay as a powerful symbol of the Irish housing crisis, something which also featured strongly in last year's winner. I think it's easy to write off these videos as promotional, but they often sharpen the music's message, and serve a major political aim.

If you're reading this and you're a cinema employee though or know people in broadcasting, take this mission from me: can we get a regular infrastructure going to promote home-grown music videos in this country? Could we have cinemas run them before the ads? Could we put some airtime to work?

And about that result: RÓIS x hhH's "Did Ye Ever Get The Ride At The Wake-House?" took the top honours, literally a year to the day after its release, and after the screening, was basically the main thing everybody was talking about. This opus, a sort of clanging industrial mutation of Richie Kavanagh, Lil Jon and demonic folksong, rendered to video by Adam O'Reilly's team and starring Alex Vostokova in a perfect lead performance... it's a once in a lifetime video.

It's also a win for the ecosystem of Irish music videos in general. This one was a graduate of the First Cut Youth Film Festival's Youth Music Video Competition - pairing exceptional young talent with established mentors and giving them the platform and a bit of a budget to do something. Brendan Canty, who is mentioned in the special thanks of this video, shot probably the most-seen Irish music video of the digital era in the form of Hozier's Take Me To Church. Mol an óige indeed. From a youth development programme to a deserved winner. Class.

Dawn's notes got a reading at the awards ceremony, and I think need to be put on the record:

I just don't think I’ve seen horniness expressed with quite so much joy and heady abandon in a video before and I love it for that. But also the boldness and simplicity of execution delivering this simple idea with aplomb, confident stylistic choices and exceptional craft in all departments, incredible central performance and for making that jumper look sexy, plus it’s often a challenge to give a video a real arc that matches the music perfectly and this has a happy ending too! Bravo!

Really the standard of everything is so high. It was a real pleasure to have watched and got to know all of these video each serving their track extremely stylishly and memorably.
— Dawn Shadforth

Colin Peppard walked home with the Taking Flight Rising Talent Award Sponsored by Kerry Airport, a name I have to say in full just because it's really fun to say, for his work on both the intimate documentary My Friend, Kev (one of my favourites for the weekend) but also this absolute ripper of a video for Makeshift Art Bar, Discipline. This video's up for Best Rock Video and Best Low-Budget Video at the UK Music Video Awards, and I can reveal it was in tight competition for the top spot at KIFF as well, with deliberation between the two taking days. CMAT and Barnburner also pulled some praise from our judge.

Let me peel back the process a bit. I aggregated all the Irish videos I loved from a twelve month period starting in August of last year, harassed my friends for weeks about what videos I might have missed, and slowly built an enormous list of videos I loved. The hard part then then whittling that down to something we could screen, which involved just sitting on the couch with friends and doing test screenings. My aim was to select at most one per artist and build a representative sample of Irish talent spanning across genres, budgets and filmmaking styles, with a nice flow from one video to the next.

I feel the need to make this disclaimer: I didn't just pick music I liked and brute-forced the videos to fit that taste - I really did watch all the music videos I could find in my inclusion criteria, even by bands I don't care for, including some of the biggest and most expensive videos from the most hyped bands. That we ended up with an all-bangers list at the end is just a testament to the quality of Irish music. There are great videos that did not make my list and almost certainly great videos I didn't see. A lot of the First Cut videos never made it to the public for example. Yet there's definitely a lot of room for improvement from the big labels as well. CMAT (who either is or isn't major-label depending on how you define it - there's Sony money there all the same) is the clear exception if you ask me.

With the help of the KIFF team, we then went hunting for permission to screen from directors and artist's teams. We didn't succeed in getting representation for all the videos we'd liked to have screened, and my private hope is that if we build a bit of buzz around this award we hopefully can do a bigger screening next year with even more on show. Some wheels are already turning.

You can watch the full playlist of videos, as we intended to show them, at this link, and listed individually below.

You can see why I was heartbroken not to put the Kibo and Morgana ones up. Both are solid and I know would have been hits with the crowd.

It is what it is. I'm hanging the curator hat up for now. Hopefully I'll be back. I'm sure I didn't miss any other piece of large Irish music news over the weekend, right?

your irish music video of the year is...

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