It's been a lifetime since Belfast staged an outdoor festival with any credibility. Thus the Vital 02 event in Botanic Gardens this weekend was a welcome and unexpected bonus to end the summer. Stretched over two days, Saturday's Vital was made for dancing, with Fatboy Slim somehow slipping through Belfast City Councils anti-dance music policies to entertain a sold-out crowd. But it was Sunday's all-day bonanza that really set the event apart.
Vital 02
Botanic Gardens, Belfast
Scottish natives Idlewild haven't played Belfast since 100 Broken windows was released. In the intervening years, they've gone from hip indie status to Top 10 contenders. Tonight, it's clear why. The radio friendly You held the world is lapped up by the enraptured audience. The anthemic American English builds on and on from one joyous chorus to another. Roddy Woomble - charismatic frontman and Michael Stipe understudy - whirls and staggers across the stage, wringing depth from each lyric. Idlewild have long drawn comparisons with REM and with each passing year prove themselves worthier of such a mantle.
Badly Drawn Boy on the other hand is suffering from an Autumn 'flu. He's also suffering from sound hiccups. In spite of great beginnings with his almost comedic looking band (including ex-Smith Andy Rourke), the show quickly falls asunder. Unfamiliar tunes are inflicted on a patient audience. Songs are started and stopped and changed and restarted, with Once around the block attempted four times before finally getting off the ground. Guitars are flung off in exasperation and all appears to be lost until Damon gets behind the keyboards and pulls a perfect Silent Sigh out of thin air, just to prove that when he does get it right, it's worth the wait. Returning for an encore, he squeezes in the redeeming new single You were right while the crew dismantle the stage around him.
When Primal Scream played Witnness earlier this Summer, they appeared tired and past it. Blame it on the dazzling sunshine of their early billing, blame it on their 15 years in the business, but on that occasion it would have been easy to write them off entirely. Tonight, from the moment Bobby Gillespie walks to centre stage with his white jacket and frilled shirt, you'd be a fool not to love them. From the pistol-cracking Kill City - dedicated to their longtime co-conspirator David Holmes - to the head-mangling pulse of Shoot Speed Kill Light, the Scream team are an all engulfing wall of sound. And between the noise, respite comes in the form of Moving on up and Higher than the sun. Both from the band's 10-year-old opus Screamadelica, each sounded as sweet and darkly euphoric as in the days they were first played. Finishing with Johnny Thunders's Born to Lose, the band proved that, with a bit of give-and-take, they've still got the tunes, the charm and the cheek to be truly great. - Helen Toland
Larkin
Liberty Hall Centre, Dublin
E musical Larkin, by Brian Gallagher (book and lyrics) and Shaun Purcell (music), could hardly have had its première in a more apt setting than in the handsome and beautifully appointed new theatre in Liberty Hall.
And it needs all the lift it can get, because it is, in terms of theatre, a fairly low-flying affair.
It is structured as a very potted biography of the iconic labour leader, Big Jim, in over 50 short scenes, with a variety of songs stitched in. There is little scope for character development in the span of the action, which begins in Uruguay in 1894 and ends almost 30 years later. It is an odd point at which to close the narrative, when he has just returned from prison in America, and his wife leaves him. He lived until 1947.
Such a bitty approach to the story leaves little room for drama, either.
The humanity and force of the man is clearly etched, but with much repetition. His long-suffering wife, forced to play second-fiddle to an ideology, is well-drawn and played. All other roles are in the realm of pastiche, some worth their keep and others not.
The music blankets a bumpy terrain of pleasant melody, somewhat raucous choruses, sung monologues and odd razzmatazz. Their lyrics are mostly an uneven and prosaic fit, sprinkled - in common with the dialogue - with modern jargon.
There is nothing there to take away from the theatre.
It occurred to me during the performance that a smaller musical - on the scale, say, of Blood Brothers or The Fantasticks - might have worked better, dispensing with the need for a large chorus and other near-redundant characters. The ones to keep would be Todd Brothers (Larkin), Aideen Wylde (his wife), Gary Finegan as a trade unionist and a trio - Brian McDonnell, Karl Cassells and Marc Murphy - in sundry effective vignettes, and a couple of others.
As matters stand, however, it seems to me that this is another case of the musical theatre's siren song luring explorers onto the rocks. - Gerry Colgan
Runs until September 21st. Booking: 01-4953179
Tim O'Brien
Whelan's, Wexford Street, Dublin
St Virginia seemed awful close to Wexford Street this week. Tim O'Brien is a man who can walk and chew gum at the same time. How often have you crossed paths with a fiddler who sings? A mandolin player who two-steps with double bass, fiddle, banjo and guitar with double-jointed fluency? Not half often enough, judging by the rapt attention afforded this particular Irish American in Whelan's.
Despite this venue's increasingly unwelcoming demeanour, its inability to afford irregularly talented players a fair hearing (distracted by the swift buck to be made with its nightclub), its pathological aversion to providing enough seating accoutrements (a few more stools wouldn't hurt now, would they?) and its greed at the bar till, this was a gig to be chalked down in the memory.
For sheer joie de vivre, O'Brien and his compadres (including Jeff White, regular guitarist with Alison Krauss, Dirk Powell on banjo and accordion, Mark Schatz on double bass and whippersnapper fiddler Casey Driessen) whupped it up with a vengeance that even the greasy tills couldn't drown out.
Bluegrass is what O'Brien does best. A three-card trickster of intricate chord structures, he, Powell and Driessen navigated through every crook and cavity of Appalachia with the nonchalance of the natural born explorer. The song titles alone might have hinted at straight up country (If I Can't Live Without Her, How Come I Ain't Dead?) but this was most definitely Bill Monroe territory, criss-crossed by detours down Cajun, Zydeco and folk routes as the mood dictated.
Ironically, O'Brien's forays into kitsch Irish-Americana reveal him at his weakest. Colleen Malone reeks of skimmed map readings of the intersections between trad and bluegrass, as if he'd misread the Crosses of Annagh road sign, and ended up in a netherworld where pint-drinking and immersion in bog holes were some kind of religious ritual.
Still, Dirk Powell's Lafayette-infused rendition of Two Journeys/Deux Voyages alongside O'Brien raised the roof with its lonesome, bellyaching wailing waltz, and Jeff White's Wild Bill Jones helped renew their bluegrass licence for another turn around the sun. Murder ballads, prison songs and high hollerin' pitiful love songs (preferably sung in the key of D) will forever be O'Brien's peerless stock in trade.
Carnegie Hall magnificence transplanted to the pedestrian environs of Wexford Street. - Siobhán Long
