Lankum
Electric Picnic, Saturday
★★★★☆
Half an hour before midnight, with Stradbally descending into darknesss, Lankum takes to the stage of the Electric Arena.
There is a supporting cast of musicians in the background, but the main ensemble positions itself at the front of the stage – Radie Peat and Cormac MacDiarmada flanked by the Lynch brothers, Ian and Daragh.
Peat raises her right hand above her head, potentially gesturing towards a sound engineer, but the crowd takes it as a teacher’s signal to quiet down. It gets quieter still when she starts to sing.
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Lankum open with The Wild Rover, and it is as beguiling as ever. Twelve minutes of soaring emotion, populated by whoops and yelps from those in attendance at any moment of quiet.
In June, playing at their own one-day event at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the band admitted to having a dislike for playing festivals – or at least those they had not curated. Elements of this slot go some way to explaining why.
For one thing, an hour is no longer enough time to devote to their music. The catalogue is so extensive, and the live arrangements so sprawling, that this feels like a taster.
When The Wild Rover ends, Peat cracks open a can of Beamish and Ian Lynch introduces the next song as a story “about why you should never go to sea with murderers.”
Festival crowds are funny things. There are the usual keen observers who have seen Lankum several times over, as well as those who have been tipped off without knowing too much about the music. The latter throw themselves in, flailing their arms and stomping their feet, eager to understand the hype.
The Pride of Petravore has long borrowed the chorus of Sting’s We Work the Black Seam in its outro, and Ian Lynch has fun thanking the English 72-year-old musician and crediting him with the melody of the old Irish ballad that inspired their marching band version. It prompts one man near the front to earnestly ask, “did Sting write Eileen Óg?”
The Rocks of Palestine is an affecting highlight, as is Bear Creek – a majestic, fiddling din that, out of the seven tracks on the setlist, is best suited to the flail and stomp. Ian Lynch thanks a man in the crowd for introducing him to Iron Maiden and Nirvana tapes as a kid. “It’s his fault I’m up here,” he says.
Whether it is employed as an opener or closer, Go Dig My Grave is the standout song at Lankum gigs these days. The visceral, physical ballad is a member of a family of traditional songs – Died for Love, The Butcher Boy and The Brisk Young Farmer among them – though Peat learned this version from a 1963 Jean Ritchie recording.
For all its history, it is hard to imagine anyone else singing the piece. It is a procession of claustrophobic, iridescent grief that both old and new ears in the tent are unlikely to forget.
