Manana In Manhattan . . . Live

PIERCE TURNER: “Manana In Manhattan . . . Live” (Virtual Recordings)

Any songwriter who can convincingly work several references to Lou Reed’s decadent ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ and the chorus of the Irish Catholic anthem ‘Faith Of Our Fathers’ into the same song (‘You Can Never Know’) must be, if not actually a God, a prophet.

Pierce Turner is a modern Irish prophet appropriately unacknowledged in his homeland. If they ever re-introduce capital punishment to Ireland it should be applied to those record companies who have criminally failed to alert the Irish public to his extraordinary talent.

Recorded at a live gig in one magical night in New York last May, with no subsequent overdubs, Manana In Manhattan must go into the annals as one of the most intoxicating and uplifting live albums of all time, ever. Listen to Turner’s wordless vocals and Wyn Horan’s violin on ‘All Messed Up’ and weep that you probably won’t hear much of this gem on daytime Irish radio because it might frighten the brainless dodos who apparently comprise their ‘listeners’. Bastards.

And you should keep the tissues, and your anger, to hand for the sheer architectural wonder of ‘Moonbeam Josephine’, the aching ‘Don’t Want Her To Feel That Way’ and the plaintive ‘Zero Here’. ‘Musha God Help Her’ is an unrivalled encapsulation of the gossip-ridden, back-biting, hypocritical Catholic Ireland we all know and love (and leave) and on which Turner’s ace band for once get to slip the leash of his usually tight-as-this arrangements. One also might suspect they had a jolly good romp on the jaunty instrumental ‘Carolan’s Receipt’.

His feisty refurbishment adds new dimensions to Ewan McColl’s classic ‘Dirty Old Town’ and successfully rescues it from the ballad-mongers and wedding vocalists who rarely show any awareness of the subtlety of the lyric. The rattling version of ‘Wicklow Hills’, one of his own songs which Christy Moore introduced to willing Irish ears, even includes a snatch of Gregorian chant as Turner’s soulful vocals take the song to new heights.

Turner confounds the received wisdom that modern technology and a sense of spirituality are mutually exclusive. How? Simply by boldly putting the technology at the service of the songs rather than vice versa. Ironically, despite his New York base, you find more echoes of the Irish psyche in one Turner song than in a month of Late Late Show discussions.

His lyrics are often saturated by the real pre-occupations of, and with, an Ireland that rarely makes it onto the concert stage or into the mainstream media except when it is condescendingly portrayed as a relic of a quaint but distant past.

The use of both strings and synths throughout the album uncannily evokes the right mood for each song with Turner’s often panic-stricken voice constantly ducking and diving as acrobatically as a PR man’s tongue.

Let the kids do without food for one week and stock up on some real nourishment for a change. Is Pierce Turner Ireland’s greatest living poet or what?

• Jackie Hayden