Review: Christy Moore, National Concert Hall Dublin, May 1st 2021.

The highlight of Saturday evening for me was watching a live stream of a concert from the National Concert Hall in Dublin by the great Christy Moore. There was no audience of course due to the pandemic, but it was still a wonderful experience and watching at home you got a front row seat. Christy was on great form and you have to admire his energy because in five days’ time he will be celebrating his 76^th birthday. His voice is as good as ever. He didn’t have his usual little band of Declan, Jimmy, Cathal and Vicky with him, probably due to covid, just his son Andy who helped out on three songs. He began with The Song Of Wandering Aengus which was written by W.B. Yeats. 

Then the very humorous All I Remember by Mick Hanley  followed by one of my recent favourite songs Ringing The Bell written by Rob Corcoran. To celebrate Bob Dylan’s upcoming 80^th birthday Christy unveiled a new song which I think is called Zozimus and Zimmerman. Michael J Moran (c. 1794 – 3 April 1846), popularly known as Zozimus, was an Irish street rhymer. He was a resident of Dublin and also known as the "Blind Bard of the Liberties" and the "Last of the Gleemen". Some of Zozimus's rhymes survive as songs, such as Saint Patrick was a Gentleman. Christy said he had seen Bob Dylan play many times, including once in Slattery’s in Cable Street, (but he might have dreamed that one!). I don’t think I have heard the next song before. It is called 1942 and written by Ricky Lynch, a very powerful song about the holocaust. His son Andy then joined him for a beautiful rendition of Bright Blue Rose written by Jimmy McCarthy.

I think Andy might be a Liverpool fan because the next song was Does This Train Stop At Merseyside?, followed by the first song by Ewan McColl that Christy ever learned called Go, Move, Shift. Christy said that he thought that a song he recorded by Paul Doran called The Gardener would be very popular and he even sent it to Monty Don, but didn’t hear back about it. He sang another song by Paul last night which I think is called Green Island and seems very relevant in view of climate change. This was followed by the brilliant and funny Christy song St Bendan’s Voyage. 

I’m not sure of the spelling of the next song by Tom Touhy. It might be called Gossoon. This was followed by a song written by Jim Page who Christy said would be watching in Seattle. The very powerful The Clock Winds Down. It mentions Greta Thunberg. I wonder if Greta has heard it. In three days’ time it is the 40^th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands and Christy marked the occasion by singing Bobby’s song Back Home In Derry. I never tire of hearing the next song, the classic Barney Rush song Nancy Spain. Christy never seems to tire of singing it either. Then he sang a song for his wife Val which was Lawless. Christy is soon to feature on an Irish postage stamp, so he went along to the GPO building in Dublin to record a video to launch the stamp. He sang one of the songs last night which is called Where Is Our James Connolly?. He stood up to sing it unaccompanied. This was followed by Aisling written by the one and only Shane McGowan. The hilarious Delirium Tremens followed, and Christy had changed some of the words to make it more topical. Finally, Christy sang If I Get An Encore in which he mentioned the likes of Pecker Dunne and Margaret Barry. In the absence of live concerts this was the next best thing, so thank you to everyone involved in organising this concert, but most of all, thank you to Christy Moore.

 

Up The Posh!

Sunday afternoon and all is well.  My team Peterborough United (The Posh) secured promotion from Division 1 up to The Championship yesterday. Posh only needed to draw the game against close rivals Lincoln City to get the point they needed for automatic promotion. They did it the hard way though. They were losing 3-0, I was in despair, thinking they had blown their chance. Then late in the game Posh began the fight back. They scored twice to make it 3-2 and in the sixth minute of injury time were awarded a penalty. Jonson Clarke-Harris who is Division 1 player of the season stepped up with nerves of steel to bury the ball in the back of the net and make the final score 3-3. Because of covid there were no fans allowed in the stadium, but there were wild scenes of jubilation outside in the carpark where hundreds of Posh fans had gathered. Fireworks and rockets went off to celebrate one of the greatest days in the history of Peterborough United.

Avebury, Honey Street, & White Horses On Surrounding Hills.

Thursday: It was sunny today, but a bit chilly. I managed to have a little trip outside Westbury for the first time in months. Me and a friend set off in his van about 11.00. Driving along the road at a village called Heddington near Calne we were surprised to see a magnificent pagoda in the middle of the English countryside. When I got home later, I looked it up and it is a Theravada Buddhist meditation centre which was founded by a Burmese Buddhist nun called Mother Sayamagyi and has been situated there since 1978. I thought that was great, it is amazing what you find when you go exploring.

Buddhist Centre.

Then we arrived in Avebury. I have been here many times over the last 40 years, but never tire of visiting the stones. In case you don’t know about Avebury, it is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles. One of the best-known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. It is both a tourist attraction and a place of religious importance to contemporary pagans.

Constructed over several hundred years in the Third Millennium BC, during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the monument comprises a large henge (a bank and a ditch) with a large outer stone circle and two separate smaller stone circles situated inside the centre of the monument. Its original purpose is unknown, although archaeologists believe that it was most likely used for some form of ritual or ceremony. The Avebury monument is a part of a larger prehistoric landscape containing several older monuments nearby, including West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill. 

Anyway, I took a leisurely walk around and took a few photos. The stones looked great against the April sky. There were quite a few other visitors wandering about. I expect this year we won’t get many visitors from other countries, but hopefully the numbers will be made up by British tourists who will explore their own country, as foreign travel will be out of the question. After that, we repaired to Honey Street which is a little place on the Kennet & Avon canal. I like it because it is mentioned in a Van Morrison song called Pagan Streams. ‘And we walked the pagan streams, And searched for white horses on surrounding hills, We lived where dusk had meaning, And repaired to quiet sleep, where noise abated, In touch with the silence, On Honey Street, on Honey Street’. 

I was pleased to find that the pub The Barge Inn has reopened because it was closed for three years. It used to be a mecca for ‘Croppies’ because you get lots of crop-circles in Wiltshire and ‘cerealogists’ from all over the world came here to study them. I had a bit of a walk along the canal looking at the boats. I think canal holidays will enjoy a boom this summer, so the Barge Inn will have a good year hopefully. As we headed homewards I took a photo of the White Horse at Cherhill which Van also might have been referring to in his song. we stopped off in Devizes because it was market day. 

The market was just starting to close when we got there, so there wasn’t all that much to see or buy. We drove back to Westbury via the back roads and saw some nice villages that I had never seen before. I should mention that I treated my friend to some of my music on this journey. I played him Diversions by Barry Booth, Twelve Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus by Spirit, Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs and We Are Ever So Clean by Blossom Toes. I think he quite liked some of it. It was a really nice afternoon and great to get out and about after being cooped up for so long.

Me at the Barge Inn at Honey Street. Cheers!

Thought For The Day.

 

Wednesday: It has rained steadily all day. I haven’t got anything much to say. I saw on the News that astronaut Michael Collins has died aged 90. He was a great man, the man who orbited the moon on his own while his two friends Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the lunar surface. I thought I’d just give you one little quote by Michael Collins that has a huge message which sadly the politicians choose to ignore.

“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed. The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.”

Supermoon & Other Ramblings.

Tuesday: The sunshine disappeared today, and we had some rain for the first time in ages. I went for a walk uptown and on the way home stopped at Andrea’s flower shop. I bought a dianthus and a fuchsia which I planted in pots. I also got a trailing verbena and a petunia for my hanging baskets. I pottered about in the garden for about an hour until it started raining steadily. Then I went to the pub for a couple of pints. 

This evening I was intently following the football. My team Peterborough United had the chance to secure automatic promotion if they won tonight. Sadly, they only managed a 2-2 draw after leading 2-0. They have a tough game on Saturday against Lincoln which will be a tense game because Lincoln also has a chance of promotion. I will let you know how it all pans out. I just thought I would show you this great photo of the pink supermoon over Stonehenge last night. See you tomorrow.

 

Thinking Like A Mountain.

Monday: The big event for me today was having a haircut for the first time in ages. I’m not sure I like it after all that, but it is done now. This afternoon I just sat in my yard and enjoyed the sunshine as Emmylou Harris, Linda Rondstadt & Dolly Parton sang quietly in the background. I managed to finish one of my books that I have been dipping into off and on for about three months. It is called A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. I am glad I finally finished reading it. It was published in 1949 and is regarded as a landmark book in the conservation movement. I enjoyed the monthly sketches of the wildlife on his Wisconsin farm. As I am British, sometimes I didn’t understand what the birds and creatures were that he was referring to because we don’t have them here. I can see the importance of this book and I think it is a shame that despite it being a best-selling book it failed to have any impact on those in power, and now we are reaping the harvest of how nature has been abused. I did have some reservations about the book. Aldo Leopold didn’t seem to be totally against hunting for instance. He reminded me a bit of the Duke Of Edinburgh who was president of the World Wildlife Fund, but still hunted tigers in India. Some people seem to believe that we should ensure that wildlife survives so that we can shoot them. I should not be too harsh on the book though because it was published seventy years ago, and the world has changed a lot since then. The issues that Aldo Leopold warned us about have now become critical and unless we sort it out in the next few years then we face extinction. That is how serious the situation is. I will just leave you with a quote from one of my favourite sections of the book which I found very moving. It is called Thinking Like A Mountain and concerns the folly of thinking that shooting wolves ensures lots of deer to hunt. What happens is that the whole balance of nature is destroyed.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes-something only known to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves meant a hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view".

In Search Of Billy Pigg.

Wednesday morning at 10 AM and my day had just begun. I went out in my little garden to check on some of my sunflowers that I planted out yesterday. I was relieved to find that they seemed to be ok. I know you are not supposed to ‘cast a clout’ until May is out because of the danger of frost, but I am impatient. Then there was a knock at the front door. It was the postman with yet another CD. “That was quick”, I thought to myself because I had only ordered it two days ago. It is The Rough Guide To English Roots Music. I’ll tell you why I ordered it. When I was reading the excellent Richard Thompson autobiography a few days ago he mentioned lots of musicians whose work I knew well, but also many influential people who I had never heard of before. One of them had the great name of Billy Pigg. It was Dave Swarbrick who introduced Billy’s recordings to Richard. Billy Pigg was a Northumberland pipe player. Richard said he was a master and hearing him changed the way Richard Thompson thought about music. He said he was a folk version of Mozart. That aroused my interest. I had to find out more about Billy Pigg. Billy was born in 1902 and died in 1968. He began playing the Northumbrian small pipes at the age of 18. He won so many piping competitions that he was finally banned from entering them. I read that his recordings have a wildness and passion which is both inspiring and wholly distinctive. His originality of style and phrasing had the mark of genius and he was a huge influence on the younger generation of pipers.

That was enough for me. I knew I had to hear some Billy Pigg. Sorry Scottish people, but I have never been a big fan of Scottish bagpipe music. However, I do love the sound of the Irish Uilleann pipes. I think I first heard them played by Paddy Moloney on Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn album in 1975, which led me to The Chieftains and other great Irish music. I also like the sound of the Northumberland pipes. I remember one magical afternoon about 30 years ago in the Acoustic tent at Glastonbury when I heard two great pipers. Firstly, Davy Spillane from Dublin who was a member of Moving Hearts at one time. He was followed by Kathryn Tickell who is a great piper and fiddle player from Northumberland. When I looked to see what Billy Pigg albums were available I was disappointed. I could only find a vinyl album called The Border Minstrel. That was no good to me because I haven’t got anything to play vinyl on. 

Then I stumbled across the compilation CD that arrived today. It included a medley of tunes by Billy called Gypsy’s Lullaby/ The Hawk/ Memories/ Coates Hall. As well as Billy there is 18 tracks of music by Eliza Carthy, The Oysterband, The Watersons, Martin Carthy, Rory McLeod, Dave Swarbrick, Edward 11, The Albion Band, Billy Bragg and other lesser-known people. There are a couple of tracks that sounded like they were recorded in the 1920s that were not really to my taste, but generally It is a great collection of lively Folk music. The kind of music that makes you wish you were at a Folk Festival in the summertime. Thank you very much Richard Thompson for leading me to the music of the legendary Billy Pigg.