White Stripes for Witnness main stage

The Detroit-based rock/blues duo will play the main stage on Sunday 13 July.

The gig will be Jack and Meg White's only Irish performance this year.

Coldplay, David Gray, Manic Street Preachers, Zwan, Underworld, Damien Rice, The Streets, Badly Drawn Boy and many more have already been confirmed for the 2-day multi-stage festival.

The White Stripes' current album 'Elephant' kept Coldplay's 'A Rush of Blood to the Head' off the number 1 spot for two weeks. They played the Witnness rising stage in 2001.

Witnness takes place on 12 and 13 July at Punchestown, County Kildare, subject to licence.

Zwan is Pumpkin without the angst

IT wouldn't be fair to expect Billy Corgan's new band to be a replica of his legendary Smashing Pumpkins.

And yet with Zwan, Corgan has done amazingly well in duplicating his former lineup, replacing D'Arcy with another female bassist, Paz Lenchantin; James Iha with another shaggy-haired guitarist, David Pajo; and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin with ... well, Jimmy Chamberlin. Guitarist Matt Sweeney is the final brick in Zwan's three-guitar wall of sound, rounding out a technically impressive roster.

Still, only a small segment of San Francisco seemed to have any idea what Zwan was about when the band arrived for Tuesday's show. But it was a very dedicated segment. Adorned with dark eyeliner, sporting Zwan and Smashing Pumpkins T-shirts, they started lining up outside the Warfield around noon. By the time the doors opened for the sold-out show, the line snaked halfway around the block.

If the audience was expecting Zwan to be just another iteration of the Smashing Pumpkins, then to a large extent, they got what they came for: the guitar work was amazing, Chamberlin's drumming propulsive, and as an added bonus, Lenchantin's gym shorts were tantalizingly tiny.

But Tuesday night's confident, well-fed band was missing one key part of the Pumpkins' appeal: their exquisite angst, which endeared them to a generation of teenagers.

Zwan's unshakable self-assurance led them into the boring excesses of guitar solos a la Phish, starting the show with three basically instrumental songs before building into some catchier numbers. Bald as ever, clad in a white dress shirt, Corgan seemed truly happy, dancing around as he strummed his low-slung guitar, and singing lyrics like "Honestly, I feel love," in the radio single "Honestly."

In a fair world, we should all be happy for Corgan. He's outgrown his youthful awkwardness, found a band he seems to love, and he's making happy music. But if one thing was clear Tuesday night, his happiness is a loss for rock music.

Presley started seriously considering the idea of an album in 1997 and worked with producer Glen Ballard in 1999, and later Billy Corgan when she signed to Capitol. She nearly completed an album three years ago, but most of those sessions were scrapped as she kept re-recording the songs until she felt they fit her.

"Re-recording, fine-tuning, writing more, taking away," she recalled. "The biggest struggle, and why I took so long, was to get me to compromise enough to put records on that were sort of safe and radio-friendly. What I tend to go towards is ambience and a vibe. I didn't go for a style, which is why the whole thing is a potpourri of I don't know what."