Lucinda Williams review: US country star marks birthday with fine gig at Olympia in Dublin
A file image of Lucinda Williams, who played the Olympia in Dublin on Monday night. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)
★★★★☆
You know the audience has got your back when they spontaneously burst into Happy Birthday before you’ve sung a note. Country soul goddess Lucinda Williams turned 73 years young on Monday and she was beaming. “I couldn’t think of a better place to be.”
Williams had a stroke in 2020 so has to be helped on stage and holds a microphone stand for support throughout but don’t let that give you the impression she’s slowed down. She’s still all biker jacket cool, and still swinging.
After aching opener (“How would sorrow find a home?”), she rips into the “shameful, unacceptable” ICE horror in her homeland, although she does remind us that there’s “nice and friendly people in the US too”.
She then breaks into the title track from one of the truly great records of the last thirty years. The sparse backing from her four-man band, who favour judicious economy over flash, is perfect, and her voice retains that heavenly honey and barbwire crackle.
She later spits Memphis Minnie’s at the orange man in the White House, just in case where she stands was unclear.
Dotted among the peerless likes of and where her vibrato could make you sign over your house, are cuts from the new record which fit in without any visible join. finds Williams in her favourite place, a good bar serving rum hurricanes with Slim Harpo on the jukebox, and the commandeering of Bob Marley’s ploughs a deep reggae groove, reminding the listener of similarly successful forays towards Jamaica by Williams’ friend Chrissie Hynde.
It helps when you have not one but two staggeringly great guitarists in your squadron. Marc Ford, who was in The Black Crowes and turned down Guns N’ Roses; and Doug Pettibone, who’s so good Mark Knopfler hired him, play off each other like they’re sharing a brain.
And if there was any lingering doubt about how seriously they should be taken, the fact that Owen McQuail of Some Neck Guitars in Dublin let them borrow Rory Gallagher’s 1960 Gibson Melody Maker for the evening surely dispels it. Credit should also go to David Sutton’s bass and the blue-haired Brady Blade whose cymbal work alone justified his performance fee.
Would I have preferred or to a Beatles cover and the slight drag of ? Yes, but that’s a miniscule quibble given how soulfully warm a set that even managed to finish with Neil Young’s overused warhorse - and have it actually mean something - was. Hats all the way off.
