Tom Dunne: In a tough world, let Christy Moore's music keep your spirits high
Christy Moore's new album includes a moving song about Anne Lovett. Picture: Ellius Grace
In a world gone mad, where TVs are turned off dejectedly, heads bowed and hearts broken, it is good to take comfort in simple things. A sunny day, a friend’s phone call, a song you love. Or, in the case of Christy Moore’s new album, A Terrible Beauty, a master craftsman at work.
Regardless of what is going on in your life, or how world news is wrecking your head, I urge you to go and listen to it now. The album is 34 minutes and 29 seconds of unalloyed joy. It will lift you out of yourself, engage you, soothe you. You won’t regret it.
The first four songs are as good a run of opening tracks as I’ve heard. Wally Page’s ‘Boy in the Wild’, into Mike Harding’s ‘Sunflower’ and then two from Brian Brannigan of A Lazarus Soul, ‘Black and Amber’ and ‘Lemon Sevens’, simply run into each as if they have always been together.
They never put a foot wrong. They are our lives laid bare. They are songs that would sound as at home in the world of fifty years ago. In the folk clubs of northern England, or Greenwich Village or San Francisco. It’s the same truth, the same humanity.
I would urge you too to get the vinyl, even if this means getting your old deck out of the attic or investing in new beautiful shiny stuff. See this as an investment in your soul, your well-being. Tell yourself you are worth it, because you are.
This will give you a chance to enjoy the marvellous sleeve, artist Martin Gale’s A Terrible Beauty, which gives the album its sleeve and title. Christy met Martin 60 years ago at school in Newbridge College. Plus, it’s on Claddagh Records, a legendary Irish label recently reborn.
But it is the sleeve notes that will enthral you. Christy has always been a collector of songs and never fails to mention the writer or the circumstances in which he came to the song. At times this makes you feel like you are travelling through time itself.
He will tell of first meeting Wally Page at the Meeting Place in Dublin in 1977, and how Mike Harding gave him his first Folk Club gig in 1966 and how the song ‘Broomilaw’ connects him to Mick Maloney and a basement flat in Rathmines in 1964.
But it is the times when Christy Moore does something that I for one can only ever imagine Christy doing that this album leans from being another wonderful Christy album to a potential album of the year. Ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury, friends, I give you, ‘Life and Soul’.
In February 2014 Christy performed at an event in Maynooth University commemorating Anne Lovett. At the event a man shared that he had been at school with Anne and although Ireland knew her by the tragedy of her death, giving birth at 15 in a grotto, he remembered her differently.
Christy tracked down a recording of the event and repeats that man’s description here. Anne Lovett, as a carefree tom-boy, a mischievous, lively child who was always up for a laugh, was always the “life and soul”. It is Anne as she should be still. It is heart-breaking.
Tying all these songs together is Christy’s voice. There is minimal instrumentation, a little guitar, a little piano, some backing vocals. He is 79 now, but the voice is as wonderful a gift now as it first was in the folk clubs of the 1960s. It speaks to you, and you’d be mad not to listen.
I put Christy’s voice and his song choices and performances right in there with the albums from people like Adrienne Lenker, Phoebe Bridgers and Alynda Segarra (Hurray for The Riff Raff), the new international writers whose works have elevated these last few years. It is music from the same well.
I would put it too with the albums of Brian Brannigan’s own band A Lazarus Soul. From the moment I heard the line “Here’s me head me arse is coming” I too thought of Christy singing it. Brian grew up watching Christy on The Late Late Show. To tune in last week and hear Christy singing his song must have been a dream come true.
Christy describes Brian’s song’s as “raw, relevant and real”.” He is not wrong. Their album No Flowers Grow in Cement Gardens is another potential record of the year. 2024 just got interesting.
