After tiring of writing about herself, the British singer-songwriter asked the public to share stories to inspire her music – and they responded in their thousands

‘This project has changed my whole thinking,” Thea Gilmore says of her new endeavour, The Echo Line. “What am I getting from it? All of humanity.” Disillusioned with the numbers-chasing music industry and wanting a break from her personal songwriting after releasing 22 folk-orientated albums since 1998, the 46-year-old is “putting people back at the centre of it. I’ve said enough about me.”

Community building has been key to the Oxford singer-songwriter’s work since debut Burning Dorothy, released when she was just 18, through to her 00s breakthrough albums Avalanche and Harpo’s Ghost all the way to her most recent studio album, 2023’s Thea Gilmore: a body of work that has won Gilmore admiration from Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson and collaborator Joan Baez.

3Arena, Dublin
Several unannounced guests feature on the first European date of the rapper’s sold-out benefit tour, including video messages from Mark Ruffalo and Cynthia Nixon

“We’d like to thank Ed Sheeran for organising this concert,” offers a member of Kneecap, one of several unannounced guests who have turned up for the first European date of Macklemore’s Free Palestine tour. It’s a characteristically two-fisted approach to the matter in hand from a band who have seldom shied away from controversy, but it has more than a grain of truth in it.

The events of the last six weeks are quite something, and perhaps not what Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, had in mind when he led efforts to pressurise Sheeran to remove Macklemore from his summer US tour, after the rapper made a speech about Palestine on stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore was duly removed from the tour, but the rapper saw his profile rise dramatically as a result – in fairness, he was hardly unknown, but his biggest hits are a decade old – while every other artist on Sheeran’s tour quit in solidarity. Sheeran’s tour limped on amid much opprobrium, while Macklemore was able to translate the publicity into a tour of his own, in noticeably bigger venues than he played on his last European tour, with proceeds donated to organisations assisting Palestinians. Dublin’s 13,000-capacity 3Arena is sold out, as is every other date on the tour.