Reviews: The Pogues, in Marley Park, did not quite deliver according to Peter Crawley, although Shane MacGowan was in sparkling form. But the team performance went to the supporting Saw Doctors. Also under review were Al Stewart and Dean Friedman.
The Pogues - Main Hall, RDS
Close your eyes and you could be in Yokohama. A familiar Spanish chant rings around the venue before murkily segueing into The Fields of Athenry. Tension mounts. Today's result is important. With national character at stake, and cultural antagonisms depressingly fresh, qualifying has never seemed so crucial.
Why, then, do the Pogues not quite deliver? Technically, the performance is as fine as it ever could be.
Out of a consideration for Rathfarnham's Leaving Cert students (that FIFA patently lacked), we have been relocated from Marlay Park, and the atmosphere suffers. A misreading of the cultural barometer also hampers proceedings.
In a time of national celebration the Pogues' fiery punk-trad might seem like just the ticket, but the undulating, booze-sodden woe of exile and diaspora signally fail to suit the mood of the audience.
Music and lyrics are at stark contrast, with the snarling jigs and reels best taken without close attention to the words. As long as the indecipherable Shane MacGowan is singing, this is an easy task.
What really scuppers the Pogues, however, is the laser-guided sensitivity of support act The Saw Doctors.
Parachuting Olé choruses into She Always Gives Me More, and performing To Win Just Once like a new (and singable) national anthem, the Galway boys lead the cheer while the Pogues drown our sorrows.
MacGowan was, naturally, man of the match. His swaying presence, wreathed in blue smoke, was hypnotic, his unpredictable wanderings captivating.
Streams of Whiskey opened fiercely, Sick Bed of Cuchulainn closed exuberantly, while in between a well-intended Tuesday Morning couldn't conceal its dirge ("too many sad days . . . I dreamt you were dressed in mourning" etc).
Fiesta, a gem late in extra time, evens the score while the crowd's celebration makes a draw feel like a victory.
But we need a win, don't we? - Peter Crawley
Al Stewart - Olympia theatre
A blast from the past, a man who typified the moroseness and self-reflection of the original student bedsit era of the 1960s, Al Stewart has always tended to suffer from accusations of portentousness. It's not difficult to understand why: both he and his songs buckle under the weight of vapid, smug academia, a dryness that threatens to suck the life out of his material. On record, this is almost forgivable - the remote control button sorts out such a lot - but in concert it's virtually intolerable.
Born in Scotland, raised in Bournemouth, apprenticed in London's folk clubs and coffee bars in the 1960s - where he associated with the likes of Sandy Denny and Paul Simon, whose debut solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, he produced to much acclaim - Stewart comes across as a peculiarly British phenomenon and something of an outsider; imagine Quentin Crisp crossed with Neil Tennant minus the wit. He doesn't particularly endear himself to his partisan audience, either, occasionally patronising them without the crucial balance of humour.
His material ranges from his early folk days to his breakthrough albums, Year Of The Cat and Time Passages: Samuel Oh How You've Changed, Roads To Moscow, On The Border, Almost Lucy, Night Train To Munich.
It is solidly crafted and performed, yet sung with a measure of superciliousness he failed
to hide. Stewart is an anachronistic singer/songwriter playing to the converted, the former bedsit students who now have more than a two-bar electric fire for warmth and comfort. - Tony Clayton-Lea
John O'Keefe (organ), Flos Carmeli, Peter McBride (organ), Shane Brennan
St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
The 29th series of summer concerts at St Michael's Church, Dún Laoghaire began on Sunday night with a home-grown event which could have held up its head anywhere. Flos Carmeli, conductor Shane Brennan, and organist John O'Keefe presented a mainly French programme of choral and organ music.
The French-Catholic influence so evident in Ireland's 19th-century church architecture has a latter-day manifestation in two liturgical works by Shane Brennan. They have roots in common with the motets we heard by Vierne and Dupré - in the Romantic traditions of sacred music founded by the Ecole Niedermeyer and best-known through the music of Fauré. In these French works Peter McBride was an ever-reliable accompanist.
The Carmelite Church on Whitefriars Street is one of those enlightened places where the choir is paid a professional rate. It is money well-spent, for there were few flaws in singing which was unfailingly confident and reliable, excellent in its control of dynamics, and always pleasing in tone. The choir's rapport with its conductor is immediate, and they rose mightily to the challenge of Poulenc's demanding Messe en sol majeur. The rhythmic bite and general vigour of this performance were utterly different from the soft-focus style common in this piece, and far more convincing. The organ at St Michael's is not ideal for the French symphonic organ tradition, but John O'Keefe did well with some rarities by Duruflé and two works by Vierne, thanks to crystal-clear articulation and a natural, long-breathed way of shaping. A fine performance of Carillon de Westminster reinforced my view that, in the long line of French organist-composers after Franck, Vierne was by far the most accomplished composer.
Series continues next Sunday at 8.30 pm with Colm Carey (organ). - Martin Adams
Dean Friedman, The Shelter
Everyone's a critic. As heckles volleyed back and forth between his fans, Dean Friedman, the also-ran of 1970s bubblegum pop, demonstrated skin thicker than calloused rhino hide. Behind Friedman's grinning obliviousness is a legacy of put-downs, critical mauling and mega-ironic appreciators.
Friedman's career peaked with the top-ten placing of 1978's Lucky Stars, a ballad sappier than a weeping maple tree. Even then he was harassed in the charts by the surly likes of the Boomtown Rats, the Buzzcocks and Blondie. With his latest album funded by an e-mail appeal to his fan base, it's obviously his optimistic determination that is his main allure. It's hard to find others.
Diary-entry portrayals of picket fence Americana are set to cloying chords from a reverb-saturated keyboard and the clean tones of smirking acoustic guitar. Friedman's yelping vocals manage both to be mind-numbingly saccharine and alarmingly offensive at the same time.
Typical Towns is a happy-clappy, frozen yoghurt view of suburban consumerism. George Washington Slept Here is insidiously jingoistic. Meanwhile Friedman gripes about the BBC banning a corporate-courting McDonald's Girl for product placement, although it contains the even more questionable lyric, "She's only 15 and I'm in love with her so . . ."
Chirpy and inane, Friedman relates a stream of prepared anecdotes while benignly assenting to a barrage of heckles. One such reminiscence cheerily tells of annoyed Manhattan apartment dwellers signing a petition against his "monotonous music".
Friedman never took the hint. Developmentally stagnant, the solipsism of new album Treehouse Journals, the smugger-than-thou rendition of Picture-Postcard Life, (look at it the right way, and you too have a picture postcard life! Send word to Argentina!) dovetail into what should be his signature tune, S&M. Whatever abuse gets thrown at Friedman, his beaming idyll remains untrammelled. Or, as he puts it, "Instead of saying ouch he just smiled in pain". - Peter Crawley
