See Emily Play
Emily Maguire’s life story is a classic of the triumph over adversity genre. In her early years she was the archetypal child prodigy, given a recorder aged three, taking piano lessons at four years old, beginning to play the cello at seven and the flute at 11 years. However, Maguire’s amazing progress was brought to an abrupt halt when as a teenager she was involved in a horrific car crash that left her afflicted with a chronic nervous system disorder and in constant pain.
“During bad attacks I couldn’t lift a cup of tea or move without walking sticks,” she recalls. She would spend the next ten years in something of a wilderness, subsuming all her pains and experience into the songs she began to compose on the guitar she received for her 21st birthday. After a decade of unceasing physical discomfort, she “Went to see a doctor at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. He prescribed a pill for me and within one month the pain was gone.”
Health restored she went to live in a tin, wood and potato sack shack in the Australian Bush. For four years she lived a basic, self sustaining existence and crafted the soul-searching songs that would form the basis of fittingly titled album Keep Walking. Maguire brings her incredible story to Belfast, for an intimate gig playing support to revered acoustic blues singer-songwriter Eric Bibb at the Errigle Inn. She’ll then be hitting the major festival circuits, playing the likes of Glastonbury. AU recommends you catch her in the intimate environs of the Errigle, next time round it won’t be quite so cosy.
Emily Maguire, Eric Bibb
Errigle Inn, Belfast
Doors 8pm / £25
Tickets available from the Errigle
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