Rock and Pop: Review - London Feis Festival
Published: 23 June, 2011
by ROISIN GADELRAB
IT was billed as Mean Fiddler founder Vince Power’s great Finsbury Park Fleadh revival. And in some ways it was.
Power pulled in the usual Irish suspects (bar The Script and U2) as well as possibly one of the biggest acts in the world (Bob Dylan) and it went down as well as the flowing cider.
The acts for the most part exceeded expectations but there were a few teething problems. The lack of big screens caused some consternation as Dylan and Christy Moore played chunks of their sets sitting down, almost invisible to the crowds at the back, while there was a duelling banjos battle for the middle ground as the main and second stage acoustics disturbingly overlapped.
Photographers were barred from the pit for both Dylan and Van Morrison, which caused some grumbles, and there was a last-minute headline swap, supposedly because Thin Lizzy might be too rocky to precede Van the Man, but the wider theory was that the Brown Eyed Girl singer may have wanted to beat the tube strike and reserve the best crowd for himself.
Drizzly day one was in swamp conditions, but all dried in time for Sunday.
The newly reformed Cranberries got off to a slightly shaky start – was Dolores’s voice fading or was it the sound system? In no time she was hollering Zombie and we knew it wasn’t her vocal cords.
Shane MacGowan sounded well but looked worryingly shaky. The wobbliness, expected but still sad to see, didn’t affect his songs, but did add an authentic tragedy to his words.
Moore united the Irish spirit with his earthen anthems and worker humour, managing to work a nod to the thousands in the rain in Finsbury Park into Lisdoonvarna. His was a set that carried a chorus of thousands.
Dylan’s UK tour sold out last year. Oddly, there seemed to be plenty of tickets for sale on the day and touts, who last year sold his tickets for £600, were heard cursing in the streets. Dylan’s just passed his 70th birthday so can be forgiven for being bored of the actual melodies for his songs, but his was a challenging set.
Soulful and more bluesy than expected, he mesmerised with Forgetful Heart. At the same time he mangled the melodies to almost every song in a set of hits (All Along the Watchtower, Blowin’ in the Wind, Simple Twist of Fate, Highway 61 Revisited), while his lyrics sounded as if they had been passed through Donald Duck’s baritone uncle. It was the ultimate name-that-tune game, unintelligible words laid over an unrecognisable track yet still an experience to treasure.
He was as sparing with his words as Van Morrison the next day, so the crowd had to look elsewhere for banter.
And this they found in with Camille O’Sullivan who was the emerald jewel of the festival, gently trampling all over the main stage giants in her red boots. O’Sullivan gives her entire being to the songs she relives and is left vulnerable and spent by the effort – take her simmering version of Johnny Cash’s Hurt as case in point. She was humorous, human, cheeky, flirty, flawed and bawdy for the drunken songs, and oh so powerful. Some may have wanted to see what was left of Thin Lizzy, but it was impossible to wrench away from O’Sullivan for a second. Her acapella rendition of Amsterdam took on the electronic might of Thin Lizzy across the park and beat it to submission.
Perhaps Van Morrison didn’t have a driver on the Sunday as he finished his set with time to spare before the last tube, skulking off without so much as a farewell. He did seem to be in better spirits than previous shows, pushing his band (who don’t get a set list) to the limit by throwing his song choices at them with seconds to spare.
He was in fine voice, a clarity that cut across the field in a way Dylan’s garbled lyrics failed. While musically both were functional, it wouldn’t kill to give a little personality along the way.