SEAN Tyrrell is a versatile performer one day with his song and music adaptation of Merriman's Midnight Court, next touring with a band. But it is in the solo, singer/interpreter mode that he engages best. Words are recruited by him from a kaleidoscope of eras, sources and writers, fed into the processor of his cranium to be measured, tried on and fitted out with the singer's forte a fine tune.
And so The Coast of Malay bar became a measured lyric, The Isle of Inisfree was sung with a hoarse, clipped economy, miles from any hint of grandeur, agreeably more appropriate to the abrupt passion of those likely to have been experiencing the homesickness of forced exile.
Aware too of the need for a bit of a lift, Tyrrell also sprinkled in sugar lumps a Peeler and the Goat parody on the deprivation and depredation visited on bulls by artificial insemination, a courtship between a Centipede and a Lady bug which ends with the former "arriving home unexpectedly" to find "herself sitting beneath the holly hocks, knitting lots of little pairs of socks". Accompanying himself here on four string mandocello and similarly appointed tenor guitar he was somewhat reserved with the intensely attentive audience, hitting easiest style in his popular, Johnny Mulhern, Mattie.
Always a singer with a conscientious, political, underdog edge, the realism of his recorded classic, Fenian John Boyle O'Reilly's, Message of Peace, was here, however, somewhat devalued by the fanciful, male centred fantasy of the David Callinan House of Delight Straddling the traditional/folk/popular fence with ease, Tyrrell is one of those strong performers who explode the weakness of any cast iron classification of song he is a great singer.
