Jimmy MacCarthy gig review: Folk hero rides on in welcome return at White Horse, Ballincollig
Jimmy MacCarthy on stage with his band at the White Horse in Ballincollig.
★★★★☆
Befuddled betimes, poetic at all times, Jimmy MacCarthy wowed a grateful, thronged White Horse audience, clearly enthralled to witness the long-awaited return of Cork's beloved favourite son, a songwriter for whom legend really is too small a word.
Introducing his 1981 debut single, MacCarthy says: “This song was written while I was in London, living in a disused hospital for rare diseases. It did very well on the radio with everyone bar BP Fallon’s review of it. I’ve never forgiven him for that.”
The night was rammed to the rafters with anecdotes, some meandering but mostly insightful. “I don’t believe in death, we all live on,” he says, introducing a huge hit for Mary Black in 1989. While in hospital recovering from a heart attack, MacCarthy’s father said he had no fear of death, that he had been “self-addressed” back to himself and would be living on to help raise Jimmy’s young twin brothers.
Jimmy sings that “we stack all the dead men in self-addressed crates” even though, in a deeper poetic sense, we all live on since “Heaven knows no frontiers”. The same song strings together images of ‘Frontier’ signs on the Swiss-French border, while “your heart is Amelia” refers to Jimmy’s mother just falling short of becoming Ireland’s first female pilot (her training cut short when she became pregnant with Jimmy’s twin brothers), and then onto a tribute to the free spirit of Nelson Mandela, who could dream far beyond his prison walls.
Only Jimmy MacCarthy can make such beautiful sense of such divergent imagery. A night rammed with anecdotes. How Mary Coughlan came to sing and in the part guitarist Mick Daly played in transporting poet Paul Durcan’s works from Cork to Dublin.
Beautiful insights galore. What was billed as a two-hour show (8-10pm) finished up at around 11pm, including a well-deserved encore.
Arguably Ireland’s all-time greatest folk and ballad songwriter, MacCarthy is a truly great artist, but this show, as uplifting as it was, also brought home why it turned out that it would be Christy Moore, Mary Black and Mary Coughlan rather than Jimmy who would bring global fame to his incredible songs.
MacCarthy is charming. He tells a great story. His vocal is not the issue. MacCarthy’s warm, tuneful voice has aged well. Around 30 years ago, I was part of another thronged audience in the Everyman willing the gods to give MacCarthy a global audience; a lifetime has passed since, but same questions now as then.
A somewhat tetchy perfectionist, he’s an artist, not an entertainer. And yet this was a highly entertaining night. Rather than being disappointed by any lack of polish, the audience feels like it’s getting a mystical peep behind the creative curtain to meet the magical Wizard of Oz, a man with feet of clay and a heart of gold.
The audience is every bit as loving and forgiving as this incredible band, wall-to-wall with legends Declan Sinnott (guitars), Johnny Campbell (bass), Brian Calnan (drums), Paul Seymour (keys) and Mick Daly (guitar).
The 19-song setlist is immense, including: and (singalong highlight of the night), along with
All in all, this White Horse show (night one of a residency of four successive sold-out Monday nights, June 1, June 8 and June 15 still to come) is an emotionally highly charged and powerful privilege for all present. It will live long in folk memory.
