Paul Brady
Vicar Street
★★★☆☆
The hat must come off to Paul Brady, an old pro who knows how to keep a crowd happy. The first of a three-night run in The Liberties proved warm and relaxed and if it wasn’t truly exceptional, it was certainly entertaining in a gentle fashion.
Sharing the stage with guitarist Bill Shanley and keyboard man 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’s been singing this 19th-century American folk ballad for decades and named 1978’s Welcome Here Kind Stranger album from the song’s lyric yet he still manages to find something fresh in its beautiful melody as his voice wraps around it.
Introducing the perhaps unlikely songwriting collaboration with Ronan Keating, The Long Goodbye, Brady recalls how country act Brooks & Dunn wanted to record it but wished 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.
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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 song writer 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 previous century. The clap-along, celebratory The World Is What You Make It houses clever couplets about Hannibal and Cleopatra, and Crazy Dreams, with its marvellous guitar riff, stretches Brady’s voice but he’s equal to it.
Floating above them all, however, is The Island. An audible gasp from the audience greets Fletcher’s instantly recognisable intro and every line is sung along to, 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, and tonight is no exception.
For the encore, talented “nordie” Matt McGinn, who gave a good account of himself as the support act, is brought out for their co-write Analogue Man In A Digital World and 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 was no room for Arthur McBride or anything else from that exceptional album he made with Andy Irvine in 1976, but nobody complained about being short-changed. This welcome stroll through a master song writer’s rich past was exactly what they were after.
