http://belfastcity.gov.uk/belfastmusic

Belfast Music, Belfast (2026)

07/10/2026

Belfast International Arts Festival kicks off this day next week, and we’ll be shouting a good bit about its music programme over the coming days. Let’s start with the one you really shouldn’t miss ✨

Ed O'Brien is a legend in his own right. The Radiohead guitarist brings An Evening With… Blue Morpho to the Ulster Hall on Monday 19th October, unveiling his new album in a special performance alongside the collective of musicians who recorded it, led by musical director Dave Okumu. Rather than simply recreating the record, the show is built as a fluid, immersive experience that evolves with every performance and takes on a life of its own.

Blue Morpho is O’Brien’s second solo album and the first under his own name, out now via Transgressive. It finds him beginning anew, drifting between hypnotic psych-folk and beguiling trip-hop with a luminous stillness at its core. Of everything in this year’s festival music programming, this is about as unmissable as it gets.

Tickets: https://belfastinternationalartsfestival.com/event/ed-obrien/Belfast

07/10/2026

Leo Miyagee is one of the very best artists this city has right now, and next Tuesday you can see him for free. An Evening With Leo Miyagee lands at the Black Box on 13th October as part of Cinemagic’s Black History Month programme, supported by Belfast City Council 🎤

Born in Zimbabwe & based in Belfast, Leo blends hip-hop and soul with shades of jazz and alternative, writing about identity and resilience with an honesty that makes his live shows something special. It’s been a serious few months, too. A summer that took in the Village Stage at WOMAD and a first Belfast Mela main stage appearance was followed by a Culture Night set at The Dirty Onion that people are still talking about. Expect stories about his heroes between the songs, and a room that knows just how lucky it is.

And there’s more on the way. On 6th November, as part of Sound of Belfast, Leo launches Vein of Folly 2 at Accidental Theatre, his and Eulogy Beats’ deep dive into the evolution of UK hip-hop. First up though, the Black Box. Don’t miss this one.

https://www.blackboxbelfast.com/event/an-evening-with-leo-miyagee-cinemagic-black-history-month/

07/10/2026

One of the real gems of Belfast’s calendar is back. Now Press Play, The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival's festival of music on film, returns for its fourth year from today until Sunday, with rediscovered classics and new music documentaries screening in venues right across the city.

A few screenings have already sold out, but there’s loads still on sale and well worth your time. It kicks off tonight at The Deer’s Head with Haircut 100: Take That Situation (and put it right). Thursday is a big one. Sisters with Transistors at Oh Yeah is Lisa Rovner’s electrifying documentary on the women who helped invent electronic music, from Delia Derbyshire to Suzanne Ciani, narrated by Laurie Anderson. The same night, Big Mama Thornton: I Can’t Be Anyone But Me plays The Deer’s Head, and the 1973 documentary Ireland: A Nation’s Memory screens at The Pavilion.

Friday brings Hail The New Puritan at the Beanbag Cinema, and Saturday has the gloriously silly Bula Quo!. Sunday afternoon offers an unmissable Alice Coltrane double bill at the Beanbag, then Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid at The Deer’s Head. And the festival signs off in style with Prince’s underrated Under the Cherry Moon at The Sunflower.

Supported by Film Hub NI. Full programme and tickets:

www.cqaf.com

30/09/2026

Something truly different lands in Belfast next month. On Saturday, October 10th, Dublin collective Hardware and Belfast’s own Plain Sailing take over Mandela Hall for a one-off night built around a single idea: no stage and no booth, nothing left standing between the artists and the room.

For four hours, Barker, Brawni, Chaz Maloney and Kessler will build a completely improvised live hardware performance in real time. There’s nothing pre-written and no fixed running order, just four artists reading each other and the room as it unfolds, with the crowd wrapped around them in a full 360-degree space at the centre of the hall.

Reuben Brown shapes the visual world around it all, presented in association with Catalyst Arts, so the environment keeps shifting as the night goes on. It’s a return of sorts, too: Mandela Hall was once a real home for electronic music in this city and this feels like reconnecting that room with where the scene is now.

This is Hardware’s only event of 2026, and the first time they’ve brought the format north. Two cities, one night!

Tickets: https://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Belfast/Mandela-Hall/Hardware-x-Plain-Sailing-w-Barker-Kessler--more/42617107/

25/09/2026

Belfast’s live music scene is opening up to a whole new audience, and it’s been brilliant to watch.

Teenage Kicks, Belfast City Council’s grant scheme helping venues and promoters put on more gigs for under 18s, has been behind a run of incredible shows across the city these past few months, safe, high-quality nights out for young people who love live music, all without the alcohol. The latest installment might just be the best yet.

The Factory Sessions are back and this time they’re taking over The Banana Block. Three of the finest artists coming through in the city right now share a bill on Thursday, 12th November: VERA, Charlie Hanlon and The Davids. One class line-up in a brilliant venue, and an all-ages night that’s shaping up to be unmissable.

Factory 61 have been cultivating emerging artists and freelance talent and putting on some of the most talked-about shows around. This next one is no different.

Tickets are on sale now.

https://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Belfast/Banana-Block/THE-FACTORY-SESSIONS-VERA-Charlie-Hanlon--The-Davids/42738647/

17/09/2026

Some brilliant news to share, and proof of just how far Belfast's UNESCO City of Music designation reaches.

Belfast has officially joined UNESCO Together, a brand new network linking us with geoparks, biospheres and fellow UNESCO Creative Cities right across the island, including Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and Galway UNESCO City of Film. It's formal recognition that our music scene sits within something much bigger, a shared celebration of culture that stretches the length and breadth of Ireland 🖤

The launch took place at the Duncairn, a venue with a long track record of championing all-Ireland collaboration, which made it exactly the right home for it. The event featured a creative cities showcase, with a short film charting Galway's rich film history, presented by Ardan, a reading from critically acclaimed Dublin poet Jessica Traynor, and a three-piece performance from Amanda Fawn, Maria Nickolay and Erin K Hill, two of whom are CQAF Bursary recipients.

And one lovely outcome already: 2026 Gradam Ceoil awardee Peadar Connor has been invited to represent Belfast at the Galway City of Film UNESCO Subnetwork meeting later this month, performing in front of thirty global City of Film representatives as well as some prestigious Irish guests. A real signal of Belfast's ever-growing place on the world stage.

Video by Anna Burnett

16/09/2026

Culture Night Belfast this Friday, 18th September, brings a night packed with brilliant things to see and hear, and this one’s a proper musical highlight, a chance to get properly hands-on 🎧

The SARC Mobile is a custom-built field vehicle from Queen’s University Belfast’s Sonic Arts Research Centre, kitted out for specialised multichannel audio-visual recording, streaming and outdoor broadcast. They’re parking it up at The Big Fish and inviting you to climb in and make your own unique soundscape of the River Lagan using genuinely cutting-edge spatial field recording gear.

Sessions run in twenty-minute slots for groups of four, no booking needed, just turn up and it’s first come, first served. There’s also a pop-up performance from experimental vocal ensemble HIVE Choir to catch while you’re down there.

Find the van at The Big Fish, Donegall Quay, from 4pm to 7pm. Free, all ages, and unlike anything else on this year’s programme.

15/09/2026

Gradam Ceoil TG4 is the highest honour Irish traditional music gives and on Sunday night three musicians from this city were standing on its stage.

Eimear Magee, Peadar Connor and Jack McGoldrick played University Concert Hall in Limerick at Gradam Ceoil TG4 2026, live on TG4 and out to the world on the Player. This was the night Cathal Hayden was named Musician of the Year, Pauline Scanlon named Singer, and Mickey Dunne got the Gradam Saoil for a lifetime spent in the music. Not bad company for a Sunday.

A few days before that, they were in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour, welcomed by the Deputy Lord Mayor along with Belfast City Council’s Culture Development Manager Rachael Campbell-Palmer and Gradam Ceoil mentor Lynette Fay. From the Parlour to Limerick in under a week. Some seven days.

The Gradam Ceoil bursary is now in its fifth year, supported by TG4, Belfast City Council and The Duncairn, with mentorship from Lynette Fay, Seán Óg Graham, Dónal O’Connor and Ryan Molloy. It exists so that musicians early in their careers here are given a mentor and, on a night like Sunday, a stage worthy of them.

Meet the three of them 👇

Eimear Magee, a fiddle player and singer from Mayobridge, who grew up in a house full of song, dance and storytelling. She plays with Cloughmór Céilí Band and teaches at home and abroad.

Peadar Connor, 22, a multi-instrumentalist and composer from Ballycastle and a Queen’s graduate, building something atmospheric and groove-led out of modes and texture. Björk and Ryuichi Sakamoto are in there too.

Jack McGoldrick, a Belfast guitarist who came to this music through jazz and stayed for the accompaniment. ROÍS and Lankum in his ear, and he’s taken it well past the city limits.

As you might have heard, Belfast held 1.65 million people for the Fleadh in August, and we go again in 2027. In between all that, a Sunday night in Limerick, and three of our own on the biggest stage this music has. Congratulations to them all.

📷 Lord Mayor’s Parlour, and Limerick by Conor Caldwell

14/09/2026

One of the boldest things on this year’s Culture Night programme is also one of the warmest. Atóg is a live collaboration between musicians and sound artists that takes the traditional Irish session as its starting point and opens it right up ✨

The project grew out of Hana Abri Smith’s own experience of learning trad as an adult. Before moving to Belfast eight years ago she’d never been to a session, having assumed, like a lot of people, that the music belonged to those who’d grown up inside it. What she found instead was an informal, generous way of learning, where listening matters as much as playing and the music passes through shared experience. Atóg takes that discovery and builds a performance around it, deconstructing the session format to reveal the foundations beneath and show that much of what sounds impossibly complex is really ornamentation, style and years of individual expression.

On stage are Hana Abri Smith, Joshua Burnside, Brendy Kerr, Catriona Ní Ghríbín and Neil Óg Martin, playing across guitar, fiddle, banjo, concertina, piano accordion, keyboard, bodhrán, whistles and cello. As they go, sound artists and producers Cameron Clarke and J SHIELDS sample, loop and manipulate the performances live, stretching and fragmenting familiar melodies into evolving layers that blur the line between traditional, electronic and experimental. Think of it like a city explorer wandering off the main streets into hidden alleyways, the tunes gradually drifting beyond recognisable forms into unfamiliar territory.

Accessibility sits right at the heart of it. By lifting the session out of the pub and into a welcoming, informal space with comfortable seating, Atóg lets you come and go as you please and take it all in at your own pace across the two hours, with natural pauses throughout.

Atóg takes over Vault Artist Studios’ newest building, the former Masonic Lodge at 197 Newtownards Road, on Culture Night, this Friday 18th September, from 4pm to 6pm. Free entry, just turn up.

11/09/2026

There’s an old seanfhocal that surfaces any time someone gets a pang for home: Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin: there’s no hearth like your own. It’s from that line that Brendy Loughran built Tinteán, a series of monthly house concerts founded on a quietly radical premise: that the best music happens not on a stage but around a fire, late, among friends, where the line between player and listener stops meaning much.

On Thursday, 17th September, Tinteán pulls up a chair alongside BelfastTrad for Áit Don Aiteacht - a place for queerness - and turns that idea toward a particular kind of homecoming.

True to the house-concert spirit, the details are held close. Three secret acts, drawn from across Ireland’s traditional and wider music scenes, will play a secret Belfast venue revealed only to ticket-holders before the doors. The mystery is the invitation: an evening built on trust rather than a line-up poster, the room small enough that everyone in it becomes part of the session.

Running 7pm to 10pm with the backing of Belfast City Council’s Bank of Ideas fund, the night doesn’t stand alone: on 19th September, the Áit Don Aiteacht strand continues with Q***r Setdancing led by Alexa Moorem proof this is less a one-off than the start of a ongoing space.

Tickets are released soon, and given the size of the room, they won’t hang about.

Belfast Music

07/10/2026

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17/09/2026

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14/09/2026

11/09/2026

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