BRENDAN PERRY/HEIDI BERRY

BRENDAN PERRY/HEIDI BERRY (Columbia Mills, Dublin)

These two artists have at least four things in common: 1, they’re both signed to the greatest record label in this or any other universe; 2, they both have similar sounding surnames; 3, I can’t hear either of their names without spontaneously shouting the word ‘genius’ immediately after; 4, they both had the same bass player for this gig.

Laurence O’Keefe (from Levitation) was the sole accompanist for Heidi Berry’s set but you’d never have known it, such was the diverse range of sounds that he extracted from his bass, especially on ‘For The Rose’ where he had me double-checking that a few keyboards hadn’t been smuggled onto the stage while I wasn’t looking.

Even so, the songs were more bare, stripped down versions than those on the records where they are allowed feast at a banquet of lush instrumentation and plush production. Hearing them tonight, you get the bones of the songs – but what beautiful bone structures they are, brittle and sensitive but still sure of themselves and where they’re going. ‘Gloria’, ‘Washington Square’, and the closing ‘Firefly’ are all three-minute masterpieces; ‘Ariel’ is a distillation of pure spirituality into sound; and there were even some new ones which, in time, will be equally loved.

There’s not many people who can follow that but Brendan Perry is one of them. A five-piece band, a great sound system and a voice that, by turns, makes contact with the gods one minute and scours the depths of the soul the next, helped make this one of the gigs of the year.

‘American Dreaming’ and ‘Don’t Fade Away’ from the recent Dead Can Dance live album, Toward The Within, were interspersed with no less than three Tim Buckley cover versions (‘I Must Have Been Blind’, ‘Chase The Blues Away’ and ‘Happy Time’: a man after my own heart or what?) and a Fred Neil song but this was primarily a gig to warm up for his forthcoming solo album which will soon be recorded and so a lot of new material was unveiled, such as ‘Captive Heart’ and ‘Lucifers’ which we’ll probably all be shouting for the next time he plays . . . which hopefully won’t be too far away.

• Nicholas G Kelly