Vicar Street, Dublin
With his amp turned up to 11 and clutching his beloved three-string Trance Wonder guitar to his heart, Seasick Steve whooped and hollered his way through a set with the barely contained glee of a performer who hasn’t been found out yet.
Fame came late to this 67 year old who made his first appearance here in the Dublin Theatre Festival’s Speigeltent a few years ago – a grizzled performer who clearly knew how to mix large doses of the theatrical with straight-up three-chord trickery – and a dubious truth. Thing is, back then, he had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek as he milked down-home hobo tales in a sharp, cut-and-dried set: blues with brio.
These days, with Brit nominations and Jack White collaborations hanging out his back pocket, Seasick Steve packs ’em to the rafters. Swigging his Jack Daniels (or might that be root beer?) and amiably sauntering through a catalogue that includes the crowd-pleasing
Just Because I Can, Started Out With Nothing
and
Dog House Boogie
, Steve rattles and rolls, shimmies and sweeps through a blues so spit-polished it could be used in a Disney soundtrack.
He is clearly tickled by his audience’s anthemic repetition of his first name (“Steeee-voh-oh”). The soccer chant chafes against the spirit of the blues like a blunt razor on three-day stubble. That doesn’t stop Steve from milking every moment, though. His drummer (a dead ringer for The Band’s Garth Hudson) rallies alongside, relishing Steve’s rambling tales just about as much as he does the synthetic grit of
Wenatchee
.
Whatever about his crowd-pleasing set list or his low growling, by-numbers medicine man antics, one thing’s for sure: 12-bar blues never sounded so washed, ironed and starched. Political careers have been built on far less.
