You know, it would be easy to consider Planxty a little naff. They play a mix of folk and trad, sing songs about the ‘West Coast Of Clare’ with lyrics that mention shillelaighs and were entertaining your parents before many of you were even born.
But Planxty are much more than just a sentimental relic of the past, and it was perhaps the fact that it was No Disco’s premier indie boffin Leagues O’Toole who made the docu which lead to their reunion that made many in the younger generation sit up and take notice. Last year’s triumphant run of sold-out Planxty reunion shows in Vicar St. earned such a reception that the trad supergroup were bound to do an encore, which materialised recently in the shape of yet another run of packed concerts.
This time The Point was the venue for the veteran folk collective to weave their spell, and when Christy Moore prompts the assembled throng by describing how the crowd on the group’s first reunion night sang along to every word of ‘Cliffs Of Doneen’, the audience responds accordingly, providing perhaps the most spine-tingling moment of the evening.
This is about as far away from souvenir shop Irish muzak as it is possible to get. You go to a Planxty gig and not only do you get a whole world of balladry and songs opened to you, it comes with a compelling history lesson as well. Some groups pillage the ’60s for inspiration. These guys at times go back to the 1760s, but breath life into the songs by the vigour with which they play them.
The musicianship is simply incredible. Indeed, when Liam O Flionn starts blowing on the uileann pipes the other three look almost as mesmerized as the rest of us, providing the core around which Moore, Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine weave their guitars, mandolins, bouzoukis and bodhráns in different rhythms. He’s also the main wisecracker, going on about the “erotic experience of the double bodhran intro”, although all of them pipe up with a joke or story at one stage or another, the audience hanging on every word.
And when Christy relates the background to one song, when the four of them were in a pub and heard “songs we’d never heard before, and time stood still for a few hours”, you know exactly what he’s talking about.