Make no mistake, Barry McCormack inhabits a different bohemian Dublin than the one plagued with big music exponents suffering from collective cultural amnesia, songwriters who assume the plain people are enchanted by every nuance of their inner condition, and ersatz experimentalists conceived in a cathode test tube.
Nope, his city is a purgatorial stripmall façade of Nightown populated by ghosts who walk: Kelly, Kavanagh, Behan, Dylan, MacGowan, the brothers Palace and Louvin, James Clarence Mangan and the flagellant Matt Talbot all blundering into each other after hours. The ex-Jubilee Allstar is a diehard balladeer, old school, observing a stubborn fidelity to the meters of his metier (check out the scrupulous comma placement in the title) – come-all-ye’s and unquiet-minded ditties equal parts old Elizabethan and new worlde Irish.
He also understands the psychogeography of cities, how they become illuminated, distorted and remade in the observer’s imagination. His writer’s eye scans fictional landmarks – Redmond’s Hill, the fields of Crookedwood, Onion Tower, the Marshalsea debtor’s jail – but also glimpses the laudanum phantoms and whiskey priests that lurk in the filigree, and renders them songwise in the language of the Protestant Hiberno-Gothic and the Catholic-alcoholic supernatural (“I awoke down in May Oblong’s house/With a bad case of the fear”). Here’s a body of song which understands that any port town is also a portal town, a hell-door that admits all manner of strange sailors, strumpets and shape-shifters home on shore leave from far flung territories where the maps are always stamped Here Be Monsters.
Granted, McCormack’s no Caruso, but he doesn’t have to be. The voice is harsh and cautionary, complemented by banjos, mandolins, singing saws, harmonicas and harmoniums all chiming in with canny counterpoints. Recorded in Capel Street and mixed in Kilmuckridge, this is a sort of Appalachian chamber music reinterpreted by sessioneers in early houses with names like The Hag’s Bed and The Maggot Bin. Indeed, ‘In The Watches Of The Night’ is a bockety cross between spoken-word what’s-he-building-in-there bedsit nightmare and ‘Frank’s Wild Years’, replete with nails being hammered into the dissonant background.
Consider Last Night… a lost weekend in a phantasmagorical theme park. I’d lobby for its creator to be awarded the freedom of the city, but going by these tunes, he’s already got it.