Margaret Healy

It’s hard to imagine a more suitable venue than The Shelter for Margaret Healy’s acutely intimate songs. Augmented by a bassist, a drummer and a keyboard player, she performs an hour or so of material from her recently released debut album And You Are…?, an enjoyable if uneven collection of atmospheric, electro-tinged acoustic numbers. Unfortunately, the show never really attains lift-off, perhaps to be expected from a gig that was, she says, conceived as a ‘semi launch-party.’

It does however serve as a good opportunity for Healy to display her skills as a songwriter, if not as a live performer. There’s something a little too laid-back about the whole evening, and perhaps therein lies a dilemma for Healy as an artist. It’s the moodier moments in her repertoire that compel, rather than the more straightforward, classically singer-songwriter tracks.

‘Taking It All Back’ and ‘Held By Strangers’ for example, are superbly evocative of contemporary urban life, with lyrics that throw an interesting slant on the minutiae of social ritual. The former contains the lines ‘The couple beside kiss like I’m not even there/And I’m left stranded/Trying to bubblewrap my heart’, while the latter is a cynical look at a La Ronde-like daisy-chain of sexual encounters, featuring the observation, ‘Although you’re alone, the only time you feel lonely is when somebody else is lying beside you.’

‘Something Real’ though, is the best of all. Backed by heavy, programmed beats, Healy takes a wry look at the painful comedown of a rampantly hedonistic lifestyle: ‘No more endless nights with mindless talk/Smoking shit and talking shite/You hate your life and you don’t know why/You’re dying for someone to say ‘Are you okay?’’ Melancholy and yet oddly optimistic, the song merits the description ‘absolutely brilliant’.

Although offset somewhat by dangerously treacly numbers such as ‘Never Never Land’ (performed twice tonight), ‘Something Real’ is indicative of the massive potential Margaret Healy has as a songwriter. Let’s hope she fulfils it.