Last night I discovered a wonderful new local band, the Sugarfree All-Stars. (a two-piece band consisting of an organ and a drummer that plays lots of happy, quirky music as well as the occasional Neil Diamond cover)
But this discovery made me sad, as I thought about all of the wonderful bands that have disbanded and drifted off into the ether. So this post is going to talk about one of them and provide some links to their music that has been archived at different websites.
In future posts, I’ll talk about other dearly departed bands.
Ballydowse
This first band I came to love during my days of traveling to the Cornerstone Festival in Bushnell, Illinois. I went on behalf of Exitzine (a gloriously fun project done by my friends and I back in the day) and had a blast. Cornerstone was a weird place, a mix of semi-radical politics, evangelical theology, and good music. The festival itself was ran by Jesus People USA (JPUSA), a commune in Chicago with its roots in the Jesus-hippy movements of the 1960’s.
Well besides the festival, JPUSA also had a record label and several bands. And one of those bands was Ballydowse, a glorious Celtic/anarchist/Christian/oi/punk band.

Also worth mentioning is that the band gets its name from the fictional village of Ballydowse, from the movie War of the Buttons (if you know the movie, you know how cool this is)
Here are some links worth sharing about them…
- My review of their concert at the main stage of Cornerstone 2001 (I forgot how much the band talked about the Iraq sanctions and their trips to Iraq as part of Voices in the Wilderness. They definitely played a pretty big role in my philosophical awakening)
- My review of their unscheduled concert at the Underground stage of Cornerstone 2001
- Youtube.com: The Banshee Song (from their 1st album)
- Youtube.com: Fantastic fan-made video for the “The Rowing Song”
- Youtube.com: “Open the Records” (from their 2nd album, about the atrocities in Guatemala), audio only w/just the image of the CD cover as a visual
- Grrrrecords.com: The Land ,The Bread, And The People (purchase album online)
- Grrrecords.com: Out Of The Fertile Cresent (purchase album online)
- CCM Magazine: Politics and Religion Mix to Impact Iraq (this story is from about 10 years ago)