Revisited: Creating The Spark: the kids behind 2024’s surprise summer hit – podcast

This week we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes from 2024. This episode was first broadcast on 13 September.

“Think you can stop what we do? I doubt it. We got the energy, we’ll tell you all about it. I searched for my spark and I found it. Everybody in the crowd, start bouncing.”

“Originally, I had it as: ‘Think you can move like us? I doubt it,’” Garry McCarthy, the founder and creative director of the Kabin Studio, tells Helen Pidd. “But later on I was thinking, like, let’s just talk about kids’ energy. ‘Think you can stop what we do?’ You can’t stop a kid from expressing themselves if they really, really want to … Why would you want to stop that, you know?”

The Kabin Studio, a non-profit based in Knocknaheeny, Cork, runs workshops for young people wanting to create music. In May, the Kabin Crew (the Kabin Studio’s over-nines group) collaborated with refugee children from the Lisdoonvarna Crew in County Clare to record The Spark.

“I was like, wow, this is actually really a banger,” one child tells Pidd. “I just fell in love with it immediately.”

It quickly became a viral sensation and has notched up 1.3bn plays on TikTok.

“One of the roles of the Kabin is to try to tell their stories, through rap, through songwriting, through hip-hop, through storytelling, through poetry. And now we’re kind of doing it on an international level,” says McCarthy.

Also, Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent, spends the day with the Kabin Crew and the Lisdoonvarna Crew at the Electric Picnic music festival.

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