Dublin Opinion

One of the things that irritates me of late is that I don’t seem to get the time to write for this blog, or anywhere else for that matter. Of course, this is just an excuse, but it means I put off developing thoughts on stuff that occur, thinking instead that I don’t time to express them properly and soon enough other things begin to preoccupy and its too late to write anything. One such occurance was the Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy gig in Whelan’s at the end of July. I went away the day after and when I got back there didn’t seem any point. Anyway, I knew in the meantime it would be covered so much better elsewhere.

Today though I decided to see if anyone had written a review and I came across the ever reliable State one which describes it better than I could. But there were two shows, and the State one describes the first night, while I attended the second. So I’m pasting in their review here for the first night and adding my thoughts on the second one, just to try to get out of the habit of putting such things off.

I know one reader anyway who might appreciate it.

Oh dear. Bonnie Prince Billy’s fans all realise just how lucky they’ve been to get a ticket for this most intimate Whelan’s show (he could easily fill Vicar St, you suspect) and before the night’s out, they’ll make silly heckles and sounds between songs to vent their giddiness at seeing the much-exalted Americana Mystic mere feet away from them. They threaten the night at one stage. Dads are trying to dance and ‘have the craic’ with Mr Oldham, while slightly younger goers are filming and snapping. Maybe State is just getting old.

At the same time, it’s easy to appreciate the place in their hearts occupied by Will Oldham. He has a shamanistic presence both on stage and on his dizzyingly prolific recorded output, conjuring worlds and ages and faces with that honeyed lilt and vehicles of varying styles. He loves to collaborate too, something that must contribute to his evergreen inspiration. Tortoise, Johnny Cash, Matt Sweeney, Mark Lanegan and Soulsavers are examples. The Cairo Gang in question is Emmett Kelly, a masterful acoustic guitarist and harmonic foil, while Lavinia Blackwall and Alex Neilson from Scottish support act Trembling Bells add a third harmony and percussion respectively. While they shimmer away, the conductor may have retreated back to the shadows behind the amps, the cue-ball scalp and fuzzy handlebar reflecting a little light.

When he steps forward again, he mesmerises and seems mesmerised all at once. He fixes a stare on something and folds and unfolds those arms while the song frees itself out of his contorting mouth. He steps beyond the man-with-microphone formula, entering in and out of a trance. The eyes seem sunken and lifeless, but the body is animated and charged. During ‘The Sounds Are Always Begging’ (a charming, focused tune about wild guitars pleading to be heard), you imagine a man in the throes of a heated argument with someone who won’t listen.

It helps that the songs are journeys in themselves. Each one, mostly taken from 20th (yes, 20th) LP The Wonder Show Of The World, is like watching something grow in a few minutes before your eyes. Roots take hold. The body extends itself before flowers and fruit begin to pop open. When someone blurts out ‘amazing’ after ‘I See A Darkness’, it’s a release following a song that at one point had made the room quiver quietly with goosebumps, his voice climbing and swooping and purring. With encore out of the way, he stands at the edge of the stage and waves goodnight. When the crowd give voice to their enduring hunger, he makes a ‘that’s it’ gesture, follows it with a ‘time for a pint’ gesture, and hops down into the crowd to be mauled.

Perhaps it’s because I have seen Oldham often enough in the last 15 years or so that he has been making the journey to Dublin, but I didn’t have wild expectations about the gig in Whelan’s on the 30th of July. It’s no doubt due to the rush of my own life now, the banal frenzy of work and dadhood, or just that going out requires me to skip out of my regular groove and skipping comes less easily to me now. So, I wasn’t like all those others who considered themselves so lucky to have gotten a ticket for the Whelan’s gig.

What was nice about it though was that in more recent times all the gigs have been in Vicar Street, but I still remember vividly the first time I saw Oldham in Whelan’s.

It was great too to be standing at the same spot on the balcony overlooking the stage as I had when I first saw him there. I remembered that, towards the end of the first Whelan’s gig when Oldham, alone then with an acoustic guitar, asked for requests, Conor and Sean had shouted out “Sean-nos – sing some Sean-nos”.

Sean has a talent for elaborate heckling – but the result was a confused but understandable “What?” from Oldham as he cupped a hand behind his ear in a genuine attempt to get the name of the song he thought they were requesting but which he couldn’t for the life of him remember. Later on that night I bumped into him and with the help of a skinful of beer mentioned the heckle. “Yeah, what was that?” he asked. “Sean-nos” I said. “What?” he said. So I explained that his music seemed to have a lot in common with Irish Sean-nos singing, and suggested that I send him a tape. I never intended to, but I knew Sean would. So I got his address. Unfortunately we had to scramble down stairs to get a pen off the barman and he wrote it on the back of a PR release from Drag City Records.

So I gave the address to Seán and he sent on the tapes, which I understand Oldham appreciated very much, as he eventually did Sean’s “chiding voice”.

It’s an indication that I tend to not bother with the stuff that used to interest me the most, or perhaps it’s a general tendency of age to let our minds be dominated to easily by the everyday at the expense of what has had the greatest resonance for us, to say that I didn’t have any great expectations.

For me the most recent gigs in Vicar Street have all been hugely enjoyable even though each has been slightly different. In one he played with a full band, which included his brother Ned, and they rollicked at speed through many of the songs that were slower and more sonorous on record, like a heavy touring rock band tightened by years playing together – although the band itself were probably only in existence for a couple of months.

Another had someone with a standup bass, Oldham and two female singers formed a mesmerizing quartet of singers.

Fans are disappointed sometimes that Oldham plays his old songs differently each time. The best example is the many different versions of what had been his earliest signature song, Ohio River Boat Song – none of which sound anything like his original version.

Although I have an aversion to the Nashville twang that infuses many of his reinterpretations – probably due to overhearing showband versions of Rhinestone Cowboy as a youth – I usually don’t mind these different renditions (although this hillbilly version might be an exception):

But back to this year’s Whelan’s gig. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for me, the State review above pretty much says it all, although it’s based on the night before. On the morning before the gig I’d read on twitter that “I see a darkness” had been amazing the night before, but at our gig, he didn’t play it. But there were similar spine-tingling moments. At one point I dropped down stairs, and normally at the bar there would be some kind of chatter or at least low-grader muttering. But perhaps for the first time after years of going to gigs in Whelans there complete silence from the audience all the way to the back door. Even the barman moved tentatively around, trying not to make a sound.

Almost all the songs were from the most recent album The Wonder Show of the World, which I’d only listened to a few times before the gig. The album didn’t impress me much when I heard it first and its appeal only began just before I went to the gig. The themes of infidelity and insatiable horniness, complexly wrought with an almost Faulknerian language, are such a staple of these and so many of his other songs that I didn’t allow myself to work through them and find the other stuff going on. Perhaps it’s not his best album ever, but along with his previous album Beware it shows that his many collaborations and appetite for musical styles well beyond the Appalachian folk that originally inspired his Slint-like early work has kept his music fresh and always worth listening to.

But the songs were transformed on stage by Oldham’s presence and the power of his voice. In a sense they were not so sung as dramatically performed, where the words were matched by poses that emulated the body language one would imagine the characters in his songs would strike while telling their story. In addition the precision of Emmett Kelly guitar and the heavy bubbling of Shahzad Ismaily’s bass provided a feedback loop that feed the lyrically urgent celebration of life and absorbed the proselytized intent, that music itself was one of the most important ways to get the most out of it.

I was irked slightly by a short Guardian review of the album which popped:

“Elsewhere, Oldham’s brief and comically unlikely recent venture into standup surely informs lyrics such as, “One day my wife went crazy, started chopping up the bed”, which border on self-parody.”

Which means you can pretty much say what you like about a song as long as you quote selectively and wrapped it around a Google-sought fact. Here are the lyrics to the song he’s referring to The Sounds Are Always Begging

Wild guitars came from forests; plainly, woodsmen share a calling. Flailing noises form a chorus: harmonies of arbors falling. And they play, say Conway, and ring, my girl sing, and plead and beg and plead and beg and plead and beg and plead and beg to be heard and had and carried on.

Without us, song is nothing.

My wife turned crazy on me one day; started chopping up the bed. Looked past me with gaping eyes. Left me too hard to be scared. She left, but circled the yard. All night she haunted the home. The kids went crazy, life was hard. The sounds of rings: boom. And they play, say Conway, and ring, my girl sing, and plead and beg and plead and beg and plead and beg and plead and beg to be heard and had and carried on.

Without us, song is nothing. I taught the children to play piano, singing with sweet voice. Music kept their mom away. Melody fostered choice, and choice brought us these days we have, and choice brought us to our rejoicing. Always choose the noise of music…always end the day in singing! And they play, don’t they? And ring, and everthing! And bounce and boil and bounce and boil and bounce and boil, and plead and beg to be heard and had and carried on.

Without us, song is nothing.

Self-parody? I clearly missed the joke.

Curiously, Oldham’s mike stand was set quite low, which required him, intentionally to crouch as he sang. This made sense, as his movements would match the changing tone as he swung from a deep but loud voice (the hunching seemed to be required to squeeze it out) to him standing almost on his toes to sing higher notes.

Here’s my favourite song from the album and from the evening:

Go Folks, Go

….although another highlight was actually at the end, during the encore when they played The Fabulous Style of The Everly Brothers.

Here’s the song I missed: I See A Darkness from the Roisin Dubh gig: