Celtic Connections 2008- Classic Album, Andy Irvine and Paul Brady

4 Feb 2008 in Festival, Music

Main Auditorium, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 30 January 2008

Andy Irvine and Paul Brady

WHILE some of this year’s Classic Album choices at Celtic Connections have drawn flak for being too recent, or their authors too young, to merit inclusion under this banner, there’s no disputing the credentials of Andy Irvine and Paul Brady’s self-titled duo recording. Originally released in 1976, it still sounds remarkably fresh and current even today, underlining the degree of innovation and radical thinking involved at the time.

The mix of instrumentation was one key element in this, as we were reminded even before Irvine and Brady appeared by the array of kit awaiting them on stage, a decidedly non-Irish, non-traditional armoury of guitars, bouzoukis, mandolins, whistles, harmonica, and hurdy-gurdy, with a modern mini-keyboard standing in for the original harmonium.

Having decided to do the whole show themselves, rather than bringing in a support act, and given that the actual album only lasts about 45 minutes, the reunited duo occupied the first half with other material from their few fruitful years together, much of which was never recorded.

Traditional songs like ‘Heather on the Moor’ and ‘The Longford Weaver’ were vibrantly adorned with Irvine’s trademark finger-picked countermelodies and Brady’s open-tuned cross-rhythms, while the interwoven tunes highlighted Irvine’s pioneering introduction of Balkan and east European sounds into Celtic music.

His youthful wanderings around that region were also recalled in a tenderly wistful ballad he wrote back then, ‘Baneasa’s Green Glade’. In a nod to the pair’s original meeting in the Planxty line-up, we were also treated to Irvine’s rendition of ‘As I Roved Out’, his singing a little on the tentative side these days, but his tone and phrasing as exquisitely woebegone as ever.

When it came to actually performing the album, both men confessed to being more than a little nervous at the prospect, given that many of its arrangements had been created in the studio, and never played live until this very night. Introducing ‘The Streets of Derry’, Irvine said he’d even had to re-learn the guitar in order to accompany it, having barely played one in the last 30 years.

They stuck gamely and good-humouredly to the letter of their brief, though, and if the passage of time resulted in a few scrappy moments, and an occasional degree of strain on voices of a now more mature register, the definitive calibre of tracks like ‘Arthur McBride’, ‘Loch Erne Shore’ and ‘Mary and the Soldier’ nonetheless shone through, enlivened by plenty of tongue-in-cheek bickering and self-styled “senior moments”.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

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