Paul Brady
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★☆☆
The hat must come off to Paul Brady, an old pro who knows how to keep a crowd happy. On Friday, the first of a three-night run at Vicar Street proves warm and relaxed, and if it isn’t truly exceptional it is certainly gently entertaining.
Sharing the stage with the guitarist Bill Shanley and the keyboard player Stephen Fletcher, Brady takes a few songs to get properly going, but The Lakes of Pontchartrain finds the fingers and the vocal cords warmed up.
He has been singing this 19th-century American folk ballad for decades – and used a line from it as the name of Welcome Here Kind Stranger, his 1978 album – yet he still manages to find something fresh in its beautiful melody as his voice wraps around it.
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial to delve into the seediest side of rap’s ‘bad boy’
Kneecap’s manager says rap trio ‘happy to meet’ and apologise to family of murdered MP
Kneecap controversy: what have the west Belfast rappers done now?
Kneecap controversy: dozens of music acts come out in support of Belfast group
Introducing The Long Goodbye, a perhaps unlikely songwriting collaboration with Ronan Keating, Brady recalls how the country act Brooks & Dunn wanted to record it but wanted to change the words. “I slave about 20 minutes on each song,” he jokes in mock horror. And “real men don’t cry in Nashville”, so the “you’re gonna make me cry” line required alteration. Brady said okay, and it hit number one in the country charts.
He has a similar story about Tina Turner changing “Benidorm” to “San Francisco” when she covered Steel Claw, which Brady’s men imbue with a pleasing Stonesy groove. Turner’s version ended up on Private Dancer, which must have paid for a few guitar strings. He was also mystified by the use of Follow On, “a dark song, dark times for me”, in an ad for Dairy Gold Butter, but he “didn’t say no”.
Brady’s continued success as a songwriter should surprise no one, because he has more than his share of great tunes. Nothing But the Same Old Story doesn’t quite match the power of the recorded version tonight – “That’s a young man’s song,” he acknowledges – but the lyric still resonates with anyone who lived abroad in the last decades of the 20th century.
The clap-along, celebratory The World Is What You Make It houses clever couplets about Hannibal and Cleopatra. Crazy Dreams, with its marvellous guitar riff, stretches Brady’s voice, but he’s equal to it.
Floating above them all is The Island. The audience gasp at Fletcher’s instantly recognisable intro, then sing along to every line, including the ones about sacrificing children for worn-out dreams of yesterday – as relevant to present troubles in parts of the world as it was to our own patch of land back when it was written. I’ve been fortunate enough to see Brady sing this song several times. It’s never less than intensely moving.
For the encore, the talented “nordie” Matt McGinn, who gave a good account of himself as the support act, is brought out for their cowrite Analogue Man in a Digital World, then stays around for the closing The Homes of Donegal. Brady has the good sense to laugh at himself for making a hames of the tin-whistle intro but recovers to prove again what a great interpreter he is.
Unfortunately, despite several calls for it, there is no room for Arthur McBride or anything else from that exceptional album he made with Andy Irvine in 1976, but nobody complains about being short-changed. This welcome stroll through a master songwriter’s rich past is exactly what the audience have been after.
