Lisa O'Neil Teams Up With Peter Doherty To Highlight Social Injustices

Cavan songwriter Lisa O’Neill releases a new single today on Rough Trade Records - ‘Homeless In The Thousands (Dublin in the Digital Age)’ featuring Peter Doherty. This is not the first time O’Neill has written about social injustices on the cusp of a change. Songs like Rock the Machine about unemployment in the Dublin dock lands, When Cash Was King about the move to a cashless society and Violet Gibson about the Irish woman who attempted to assassinate Mussolini in 1926 – this new song was written in response to the growing issue of homelessness in Dublin and Ireland.

Lisa met Peter Doherty last summer and this is the second song they have collaborated on. She also joined The Libertines onstage at the Dublin Olympia last September for a moving rendition of ’Night of the hunter'

Musicians who helped make this track - Peter Doherty for vocals and lyrical contribution, Brian Leach on Hammered Dulcimer and Banjo, Joseph Doyle on Double Bass, Colm Mac Con Iomaire on Violin, Cormac Begley on Concertinas and David Odlum for production and mixing.

Advertisement - scroll to continue reading

It’s been a remarkable few years for Irish songwriter Lisa O’Neill. Her acclaimed recent album All of This Is Chance ranked highly on many critics 2023’s Albums of The Year Lists. Amongst the wealth of praise, Gideon Coe at BBC 6 Music picked it as his Album Of The Year. It was No. 3 in Mojo Magazine’s Folk Albums Of The Year, and No.24 in their main Albums Of The Year List. Bob Boilen at NPR deemed it his No.3 Album of The Year and it was one of Songlines’ Top 10 Albums Of The Year and Uncut Magazine’s No.17 Album Of The Year and at No. 33 with The Quietus. May 2023 saw Lisa make a memorable appearance on Later with Jools Hollland.

A raconteur in the truest sense of the word, O’Neill is a five-time BBC Folk Award nominee and her previous album Heard a Long Gone Song was named The Guardian’s 2019 Folk Album of the Year. She had 2 songs feature in Peaky Blinders – Blackbird, her own composition, and an adaptation of Bob Dylan’s All the Tired Horses soundtracked the final scene of the epic TV drama.

All Of This Is Chance took O’Neill’s inimitable voice to greater heights, or depths, depending on which way you look at it. Throughout all eight songs on this album, it feels like she is writing in a constant state of wonderment. Not only a portrait of the artist in love with nature, but one perplexed by the ever-expanding gulf between it and modern society. O’Neill sings across that divide while simultaneously digging deep into the land, eyes transfixed on a universe of colourful birds, and beyond them stargazing into the atomized constellations of outer space of which we ourselves are fragments.

© Scoop Media