Belfast live music: the Cathedral Quarter and beyond

Belfast is the island’s second city, and its music scene has a different texture to Dublin’s: more rock and punk in the bloodstream, a strong singer-songwriter tradition, a trad scene that has rebuilt itself around the pubs north of the city centre, and a set of mid-size venues that get the touring acts Dublin gets, often a night earlier or later. Most of what matters is within a fifteen-minute walk of City Hall, which makes it one of the easiest cities on the island to do a music night on foot.

A note on our data for Belfast: because the pubs there publish less structured event information than their southern counterparts, and because the ticket platforms that serve Northern Ireland describe events differently, our listings skew towards ticketed shows, and almost none of the upcoming Belfast gigs in our database currently carry a “free” badge. That does not mean there is no free music. It means we have not yet got a confident source for it, and we only flag free when we have. The pub sessions below are real and mostly free; we just cannot promise a badge on every one.

The Cathedral Quarter is the grid of cobbled streets and entries around St Anne’s Cathedral, north of the city centre and a short walk from Donegall Street and Royal Avenue. It is the city’s nightlife district, and the live music in it runs from trad sessions in old bars to touring bands in converted warehouses.

The Duke of York on Commercial Court is the pub on all the postcards: a narrow, mirror-and-mahogany bar down a lantern-lit entry, with live music most nights and a bigger live room, the Harp Bar, attached. The Dirty Onion on Hill Street is a 1780s warehouse turned into a bar with an enormous covered yard, and it runs free trad sessions and live music nightly, often with the musicians in the yard rather than inside. The Black Box, a few doors along on Hill Street, is an arts venue with a cabaret-style main room and a smaller bar, and it programmes jazz, folk, experimental and spoken word; it is the room to watch if you like your music slightly off-centre. The John Hewitt on Donegall Street is a cooperative-owned pub with a reputation for sessions and a crowd of writers and musicians, and The Sunflower on Union Street, a little further north, is the beloved outlier: a corner pub with a security cage on the door left over from harder times, a beer garden, and a jam-packed programme of jazz, folk and trad in the upstairs room.

Belfast’s traditional music scene is less visible than Galway’s but it is thriving, and a few pubs are the heart of it. Kelly’s Cellars on Bank Street, behind Castle Street and a short walk from the Cathedral Quarter, is one of the oldest pubs in the city, low-ceilinged and whitewashed, and it runs sessions through the week with a particularly strong weekend afternoon. Maddens Bar on Berry Street, around the corner, is the musicians’ pub: a plain upstairs-and-downstairs bar where the sessions are serious, the singing is unaccompanied, and the regulars have been going for decades. The Deer’s Head on Lower Garfield Street, which also brews its own beer, runs a Friday session from 17:00 that is ideal for an after-work start. Over in Sailortown, by the docks, The American Bar hosts a Tuesday singing session alongside its regular music. Belfast TradFest in the summer turns all of this up to eleven, with sessions, concerts and classes across the city.

For etiquette, the rules are the same as anywhere else on the island; our first-timer’s guide to sessions covers them.

The Ulster Hall on Bedford Street, a few minutes south of City Hall, is Belfast’s Victorian concert hall and its most storied venue: the Ulster Orchestra’s home, with a pipe organ at the back of the stage, and the room where every generation of local rock bands has played its biggest hometown show. It runs both seated and standing configurations, so check what you are buying. Classical concerts, with the seats in, are formal and start on time; rock shows, with the floor cleared, are a different animal. Both are good. Our concert halls guide has more on how the seated nights work.

The Limelight on Ormeau Avenue, south of the centre, is the city’s main standing venue for touring rock, indie and metal, and its two rooms (Limelight 1 and Limelight 2) take different sizes of act on the same night. It is the Belfast equivalent of The Academy in Dublin: loud, late, and with club nights, including a long-running Saturday, that follow the gigs. The Empire Music Hall on Botanic Avenue in the Queen’s Quarter is the other essential: a converted Victorian church with a bar downstairs and a tiered, balconied music hall upstairs, where touring singer-songwriters, tribute acts and comedy share the calendar. The surrounding streets are the student quarter, so it suits a night that starts with food on Botanic and ends somewhere nearby.

Also worth knowing: Voodoo on Fountain Street, a small, loud bar and venue in the centre for punk, metal and alternative bands; Mandela Hall at Queen’s University, the students’ union venue that takes mid-size touring acts; and Waterfront Hall on the river, a modern auditorium with a smaller studio, for seated concerts and the kind of touring shows that want a comfortable room.

The Oh Yeah Music Centre in the Cathedral Quarter is not quite a venue and not quite a museum. It is a music charity in a converted whiskey warehouse, with an exhibition on Northern Irish music history, rehearsal rooms, and a performance space that hosts youth open mics, listening nights built around classic albums, and gigs by emerging local acts. If you are interested in why Belfast sounds the way it does, an hour there explains a lot. The Sunday youth open mic and the album-anniversary nights that show up in our listings are the regular events; the one-off gigs are where you will catch next year’s bands.

SSE Arena Belfast in the Titanic Quarter, across the river from the centre and a walk or short taxi away, is the city’s arena and takes the global tours. Like 3Arena in Dublin, it is tiered, the “from” price on a listing is usually the furthest seat, and getting away afterwards takes patience. Belsonic in the summer brings outdoor festival-scale shows to Ormeau Park, and Belfast International Arts Festival in the autumn programmes concerts across the halls.

Tickets in Northern Ireland work under UK rules rather than Irish ones, which matters for resale; our tickets guide explains the differences. For what is on tonight, the Belfast live music page has every upcoming listing, and the Antrim, Down and Derry pages cover the rest of the north.