Lisa O’Neill
All Together Now
★★★★☆
The main stage at All Together Now is flanked by images of Sinéad O’Connor and Christy Dignam, icons of Irish music who have passed in recent months. It is the loss of O’Connor that is most keenly felt during Lisa O’Neill’s spry Saturday afternoon set as the Cavan folk singer delivers a fervent cover of O’Connor’s 1990 ballad Black Boys on Mopeds.
The song is about violence against young people and O’Connor’s decision to move her family to Ireland from London so that they would be safer. The lyrics, which orbit themes of death and injustice, have obviously taken on a new sad resonance in the wake of O’Connor’s passing.
“I loved her,” says O’Neill, whose performance walks a respectful line between elegy and a celebration of O’Connor’s memory. “Sinéad got into trouble but it was the right kind of trouble.”
Her voice is rawer and stormier than O’Connor’s, though no less resonant. Her take on the track is ruggedly beautiful. It’s of a piece with the rest of an enchanting set framed by grey skies and briefly interrupted by rain.
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O’Neill sings through the shower, and the audience stays with her. If anything, the weather reflects the drama of her music. She evokes the claggy tumultuousness of the Irish summer on Old Note, delivering lines such as “the wind whistles you in behind the springtime” in a heartfelt wail.
That song is a standout from her fifth album, All Of This Is Chance, which reached six on the Irish charts and has basked in five-star reviews. She leans heavily on the record, a wonderfully discordant affair brimming with post-lockdown joy.
O’Neill celebrates the wonder of nature in Birdy From Another Realm, inspired by her observations of a romantically inclined peacock on a farm several years ago. And she concludes her gorgeously torrid set with All The Tired Horses, her Dylan cover from Brummie noir caper Peaky Blinders. It is a gut punch of dark melancholia — a powerful conclusion to a performance as stark and spirit-lifting as sunshine slicing through a summer downpour.
