DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR: I STAY IN most nights. I gaze at the world through the television screen. Last week I was watching a policeman in Mumbai standing outside the Taj Mahal Hotel, taking photographs of the billowing smoke on his mobile phone, when suddenly my TV reception began to break up. Chorus was on the blink.
Since Chorus went digital my television reception has been constantly on the blink, so I decided to abandon the fireside and venture out to the Christy Moore gig in the Park Hotel.
It was a mixed audience; young punters who were probably not even born when Planxty were touring, and sedate couples holding hands and relishing memories of wilder days. The bar was closed and the bouncers had black jackets and well-shaved heads.
Then Christy came on, wearing a black T-shirt, and sang for two hours in a variety of spotlights, with Declan Synott to his right.
There is nothing brash about Christy. He is like a Zen master, calling his audience to attention with soft musical vowels.
When he gives himself to ballads such as Nancy Spain, it is like watching the highest point of a tradition. All the ballad singers that ever lived, or sang late-night songs over seven generations, haunt the room. All the tears of sorrow, shed by outcasts, exiles, and the scapegoats of the world, well up and are gathered into soft vowels, and lonely melodies that ride the master's breath.
But Christy also exudes a sense of remembered wildness; he is a survivor of late nights long ago. Sometimes he builds a lyrical mood and then scatters it with a song of indignation, punched out with the rhythmic power of a hammer and tongs. His squat figure is like a druid carved from stone, a nut of fierce passion, and his own wounds fling out the songs like stones from a sling, as he calls to mind the nameless poor and the oppressed of history.
When he was finished I needed a pint in Finns to regain my composure before venturing down the road to the Annebrook House Hotel where Finbar Coady was doing a gig with the French drummer, Jean-Philippe Morer.
Coady is another extraordinary artist. His vocal skills and performance energy carry on from where Joe Dolan left off.
A radio mike is clipped to the side of his face, so he can play guitar while wandering around the room, bringing his physical presence almost into the arms of his audience, as he eyeballs the ladies with intimate phrases from beautiful love songs.
Later, in the toilet, I met a young man, about 30 years old, who was, as they say, out of his head. He thought he knew me, and insisted on detaining me at the washbasin.
"Don't go," he said. "Don't go. I need to talk." But he couldn't quite bring himself to talk.
He contorted his facial muscles, and twisted them in knots, as if he was trying to squeeze juice out of an old rag. But nothing came.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
His eyes were red, and unable to focus on anything. Searching the ceiling. Searching the floor. Staring into the mirror. Then he wanted to smoke.
I said it was illegal.
He didn't seem to care what was legal. He took out a pack of Marlboro. He couldn't get his fingers around a single cigarette so he abandoned the attempt and flung the pack over his shoulder.
"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked, with bitter fury that implied he himself was enduring hell.
I said: "I'm having a great night." Then he asked me was I a guard.
I assured him I was not.
"I hate guards," he said, with the unfocused rage of a young man, and just to change the subject I told him about the Christy Moore gig.
That got his attention.
"Christy!" he whispered with reverence. "Christy!" And then he attempted to sing the Cliffs of Dooneeninto my ear, but he only knew the first line so he stopped and suddenly broke into tears.
"Are you sure you're okay?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm fine." He wiped his face with his shirt. "It's okay," he said. "It's okay."
But he wasn't talking to me now. He was talking to himself as he walked out the door, back to the lounge, where his lonely performance continued.
