Clare teens board the John Lennon bus

A MUSIC video to accompany an original song written by a group of Clare teenagers, who just a few days ago did not know one another, could soon be seen by people all over the world.
It certainly wasn’t “a hard day’s night” when eight youngsters this week got the chance to get on board the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus. The bus rolled into Ennis’ Glór car park on Tuesday and in partnership with Music Generation Clare, the lucky teenagers from all over the county were able to record and produce their own song and music video. That song and video has since been taken away by the tour bus’ on-board engineers to add the finishing touches before they put it on the internet.
Emer O’Flaherty, development officer with Music Generation Clare, described the teenagers’ experience as “magical”.
“It was a great day and the young people were just amazing. We had quite a lot of applications from young people who wanted to get involved with this. There was great interest but there were only eight places available.
“The eight successful teenagers were people of very diverse musical interests, some more interested in song writing, others recording and others the production side of things. They were aged between 14 and 17 and they had varying musical tastes but they all really enjoyed working together. They all wrote a song and after lunch they shot a music video outside in the beautiful weather. They just loved it. It was just magical in that sense to see them all coming together on this project. This has been really positive,” she said.
She explained that the finished song will be put on the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus YouTube channel. “The tour bus is continuing on its journey through Ireland and the engineers have taken it away for editing and mixing. It will be put on YouTube and all of the young people are very excited about it.”
Emer added that following the success of the bus’ visit, Music Generation would be delighted to welcome them back to Ennis. “We would only love to do it again. Days like that are really special,” she said.
Emer concluded by saying that this is the first of many planned events by Music Generation Clare aimed at teenagers. “We had been mostly doing projects with younger children but hopefully we will be working more with teenagers from September and October. We are gradually expanding,” she said.
The Clare visit was part of a 24-day Irish national tour. The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is a non-profit state-of-the-art mobile audio and HD video recording and production facility. The bus, which was made possible by Yoko Ono Lennon, is dedicated to providing young people with tours of the studios and participation in free song-writing and multimedia-production workshops.

By Jessica Quinn