Alanis Morissette
Malahide Castle, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Alanis Morissette arrived into the mid-1990s like a musical thunderbolt, inspiring myriad singer-songwriters in her wake, few of whom managed anything like the same cleverness with wordplay or coruscating frankness about sex, society and inequality. Decades before Chappell Roan would frighten radio-station playlisters with intimate lyrics about getting knee deep in the passenger seat, Morissette was heralding the merits of going down on your lover in a theatre, and delivering kiss-offs to the patriarchy.
Released when she was 21, Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill was a game-changer not just for her but for the industry itself, slowly waking up to the idea that perhaps one day there could be not just one woman artist but many of them – such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX – to rule the charts.
These days, although Morissette continues to release albums – most recently Such Pretty Forks in the Road, from 2020, and the meditation album The Storm Before the Calm, from 2022 – there’s something of the time capsule about the Ottawa-born, California-dwelling singer. And so it makes a certain kind of sense that in advance of Morissette’s arrival on stage, she proffers her own hype machine on the big screen in the form of a two-minute showreel advertising her iconic status, with clips from down the years featuring endorsements from Kelly Clarkson (“She’s one of the reasons I’m a songwriter.”), Olivia Rodrigo (“Advice from Alanis Morissette ... that’s iconic.”) and Halsey (“The collaboration was a life-altering experience for me.”).
If it feels like a warning sign for artistic insecurity, it’s also effective, pumping up the already enthusiastic crowd. Flanked by a five-piece band, Morissette takes the stage in a blue sequinned shirt, black leather trousers and trademark tousled barnet, looking close to identical to the archival footage.
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Hand in My Pocket, with its chorus the postman could whistle, kicks off proceedings, before she segues into Right Through You. Two gems from Jagged Little Pill were never going to be a bad idea to start, but as Morissette moves through songs including Reasons I Drink and Would Not Come, the atmosphere is a little soundchecky: there are longueurs, and as the camera pans across the crowd you can see men and women of a certain age holding their partners’ hands and thinking about their mortgages.
Would it have been a better idea to simply call it the Jagged Little Pill 30th Anniversary Tour and condense the 90-minute set? Possibly. But Morissette has every right to give her other songs an airing, and her vocals are impeccable: she’s a turbocharged mezzo-soprano who can caterwaul as easily as whisper, and hold a note longer than you’ll wait in line at the ladies’ Portaloos.
Still, it’s a relief when Morissette settles back into the hits. A mortified-looking fan called Gráinne is brought up to help out on the first verse of Ironic, and even if Gráinne is mostly too embarrassed to sing, it’s a flourish in a gig that is largely frill-free by design.
Morissette doesn’t do banter: there are few words between the songs, other than a brief attempt at an Irish accent. But the lyrics of her greatest songs are still good enough to make you think – and then there’s the thrilling power of You Oughta Know, undimmed by time.
The singer leaps and whirls, her long brown hair thrashing alongside the guitar. With the twinkling keyboard synths of Thank You and the grandly doomy Uninvited by way of an encore, her applause feels earned from an audience grateful for the chance to hear the hits and, as they hold up phones to friends far away, relive important moments from their lives.
