Chuck Berry reviewed.
Chuck Berry
Academy, Dublin
Yes, Chuck Berry is still alive and, if not kicking, at least still performing.
The duck walk is gone and so is the memory of the 81-year-old who is arguably - and John Lennon and Elvis Presley are on the record as saying - the single most important influence in the history of rock and roll music.
"I've got 256 songs," he told a packed Academy in Dublin's Middle Abbey Street, "I can only remember five or six." He forgot the words to Caroland to My Ding-A-Ling, though he had a willing audience to help him along.
Berry is accompanied these days by his daughter Ingrid, who gives the oomp that is now conspicuously absent in her father and can play a mean harmonica, and by his son, Charles Jr, who churns out 12-bar riffs on rhythm guitar.
Berry announced his arrival in a pair of day-glo orange trousers and white sailor hat with Roll Over Beethoven, a song now so hackneyed we forget how original it once was. The same goes with so many other of his great songs like School Days, Johnny Be Goode, recently voted by Rolling Stonemagazine as the greatest guitar song ever written, and C'est La Vie (You Never Can Tell), given a new lease of life in Pulp Fictionand one of the few of his better known songs that depart from the 12-bar routine.
By the time Reelin' and Rockin'came along, Berry invited some of his young female fans on stage to dance with him and then he departed the stage exactly an hour after first coming on, as per his contract, one imagines, and without an encore.
Outside on Middle Abbey Street, a white stretch limousine waited in the street.
You wonder why he bothers anymore.
RONAN McGREEVY