North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Hey Hey My My

Well, Neil was brilliant - as I write this, he's probably wowing another audience (he is playing three dates in Vicar St., last night, tonight and tomorrow night). The show, billed as solo and acoustic, consists of Neil with a stack of guitars, two pianos and an organ. The purpose of the tour is to debut his latest album - a concept album, called Greendale. The concept is the life and times of an eccentric family living in the eponymous fictional town on the north east coast of the US. The songs are very very good and very entertaining - the style of the album is wry, folksy, sardonic and sweet (pretty much what you'd expect from Old Shaky).

What really adds to the enjoyment is how he sets the scene for each song. Preceding each song is a yarn that describes the characters we're going to hear about, told so well that by the time he begins the intro, we're dying to hear more. In fact, the night is as much an evening of storytelling as singing.

He arrived on stage just after 8pm and performed every song off the album which takes about two hours. Then he took a 15 minute break and then did an hour of old favourites (set list of the tour here). The only drawback was the long haul home - I didn't leave Dublin until 11.30pm and it was well into Monday morning before I got home. Still, it was well worth the 105 euro, and when I reclaim the missus from the pawnshop, I'm sure she'll agree.

I do need to mention one thing. If you are going to spend a lot of money to see your hero, you'd hope not to make a complete dick of yourself. Not as easy as you'd think. A quartet of North Americans let down their entire sub-continent with their performance. Two of them were warned for shouting even before the gig began (a beefy chap with an ear-piece did a lot of finger-wagging and pointing to the door). That quietened them for a while but they perked up again all too soon. One of them would shout out every so often "Neil, you rawk my world", You're awesome", and even "Neil, I love your shoes, man".

Oh, did I mention that they were in the front row. Actually, it wasn't so bad, because Neil swatted them down a couple of times, to applause. One audience member did raise a laugh from everyone, Neil included. Neil has a big songbook that contains all his songs. In the middle of the set, he decided to play a song that he hadn't played in a long time. He began searching in the book but couldn't find it. A wag in the audience called out that "maybe Stills took it". You had to be there. We never did find out what song he was looking for.

A review of his gig in Hamburg can be found here.

Posted by Monasette at May 12, 2003 09:40 PM