You Never Know Who's Watching

( I played at the Greystones Beach Festival on August 13th).

"You never know who's watching"' - I say it to the people who stop in front of me on Grafton Street, and this August life proved my point in public. A video of me playing started going around among Venezuelans, the way things travel when a country is scattered across the world, passed from phone to phone until it landed in front of a woman living in Wicklow who happens to be Venezuelan too. That is how Fátima Alvarado found me. No manager, no agency, nobody in a glass office explaining my "brand" back to me. A compatriot I had never met watched a video and wrote to me. Fátima runs the Greystones Wellness Hub ( IG @greystoneswellnesshub ) , and she invited me to play at the Greystones Beach Festival the 13th August 2026, which her hub put together with the Wicklow Sports and Recreation Partnership (@activewicklow) and Wicklow County Council. So when people ask why I keep posting, why I keep going out to play even on the days the Irish weather looks at me like a personal enemy.. this is the answer. You never know which of those days is the one somebody is watching, or which country they're watching from.

On Thursday the 13th of August I left Kildare early. Train to Heuston, then Connolly, then Greystones, with my guitar doing that thing guitars do on public transport where they occupy the space of a second passenger and apologise to nobody. Fátima was waiting with her family, and the treatment was a 10 out of 10. Not the polite kind people give you when they want something. The real kind. If you have ever been the foreigner arriving alone into a town where you know one person, you know what that is worth. We recognise each other fast, the ones who left.

I got there early, while the whole thing was still being built, and that is my favourite hour of any event. I met the practitioners setting up their stalls and the recovery zone crew, who by the end of the day were the most popular human beings on that beach (Rodrigo doing Indian head massage had a queue that never emptied). Fátima was not only organising, she was also teaching Zumba.

The programme was enormous. South Beach from four until eight, part of Wicklow Outdoors Week, a wellness stage running all afternoon, sport and sea and a kids zone down the other end. And there Live Band by Adrian Bueno (Walkway around Stalls). The walkway, right where the people pass...so that is home turf for me.

I played this one in band format, with José Fondón on bass and my brother Felipe Bueno on the flamenco cajón. My brother. His first performance ever, on a beach, in a country that is not the one we were born in. I've played hundreds of times at this stage and I was still more nervous for him than for myself, hehe, i felt super proud of them.

So, we had the freedom to play all 12 songs of Ella, the LP I'm working on right now. Six of them you already know, because they're out on Spotify in punk folk format as Ella (Raw Tapes), and on CD too. The audience was wonderful. Kids came right up to the front, older people stayed in the sun, families drifted over from the water. Nobody asked me for a cover, which for a man who plays original music only is basically a religious experience. And the best came at the end, when somebody told us we could be heard from almost the whole beach. We had no idea. Three people and a cajón in our own little world, and the sound was travelling much further than we imagined.

Here is the part that still makes me smile. Fátima invited me to a wellness festival knowing nothing about me beyond a video. She didn't know im curious student of the "soul and mental" topics. She invited a punk singer and got somebody already living in that world. So when I finished my set I stayed for the laughter yoga with Parag, and I was no tourist in that circle. People on a beach in Wicklow laughing on purpose, as an exercise, with no joke required, and I was gone within seconds. Laughing doesn't ask permission.

I've been thinking about the beach comment ever since. You never really know how far your voice is carrying. You think you're playing to twenty people and the wind is taking you down the entire shoreline. Same with an Instagram message. Same with a song you record in your room at two in the morning wondering if it matters to anybody. It carries further than you think, and the only real mistake is deciding in advance that nobody is listening.

Thank you Fátima, thank you Greystones Wellness Hub, Active Wicklow and Wicklow County Council. Thank you José. And thank you Felipe, for saying yes to the thing that scared you.

I love you all very much, and please, fly out of the cage.

Listen to Ella (Raw Tapes) on Spotify, or come find me on Grafton Street. I'm there most days.

By Adrian Bueno