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CHANGE OF VENUE: Tiffany Murray: My Family and Other Rock Stars

  • €18
  • Marino Church, Bantry
  • 17/07/2025 - 11:30 am

CHANGE OF VENUE: MARINO CHURCH. Due to inclement weather and bad road conditions to Kealkil the event has been moved to Marino Church.

My Family and Other Rock Stars is Tiffany Murray’s funny, touching, fascinating memoir of a rural childhood surrounded by rock stars, including Horslips. It’s a remarkable, truly unique story of growing up in a rural idyll, of Cordon Bleu cookery and of a childhood where the chances of bumping into Freddie Mercury playing piano, Barry Devlin playing his shamrock-shaped bass guitar, a group of Hell’s Angels turning up to record for Lemmy, or even the hope of David Bowie appearing, were as normal as hopscotch and homework.

‘Highly entertaining’ The Guardian. ‘Delightful’ The Independent

Named a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times & Times, the Guardian and the Daily Mail

Tiffany will be in conversation with music and arts journalist, Pat Carty

In a small corner of a field in Wales, Tiffany Murray is hiding with Boggle the dog, dreaming of her mum’s moussaka, blackberry and apple crumble, and, if she’s lucky, ice-cold lemonade. A sheep bleats. The smell of hay tickles her nose. The twang of a guitar and crack of a snare carry on the breeze. It’s the late 1970s and Tiff lives with her mum, Joan, at Rockfield, the iconic recording studios. This place of legend, where some of the most famous rock albums of all time were recorded, is the background to a freewheeling, ever-changing whirlwind of a childhood. Tiff’s days are spent running around the farm, making friends with local wildlife and helping out with the endless array of dishes her mum creates to keep the bands fed. She;s looking for a dog, she’s looking for a father; but the one constant throughout is her and Joan, building an unconventional family in the most unlikely of locations.

‘A sublime account of famed Welsh music studio Rockfield… This childhood tale, then, is Cider With Rosie, but fuelled with something far stronger – Lemmy’s Jack Daniel’s, perhaps.’ Book of the Day, Nick Duerden, The Observer

‘My Family and Other Rock Stars is sometimes charming, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes both funny and unsettling, and always – from start to end – very, very good.’ Roddy Doyle