HP sharpshooter Kathrin Baumbach was in the thick of the action - check out her photo gallery here.
Last year’s My Favourite Faded Fantasy was bursting with raw emotion and gut-wrenching honesty, the sort of album that drags you in and won’t let go. Snaring the crowd at the Iveagh Gardens, though, is no easy feat.
To be fair, there’s certain things working against Damien Rice. Throughout the opening 30 minutes, a flock of seagulls can be heard loud and clear (the shore-hugging birds, not the dubiously-coiffured new-wave band). Indeed, there’s times when nothing at all can be heard, as when the PA system packs in for close to a minute during ‘Sand’.
There’s no doubting the quality of Damien Rice’s songwriting chops though, nor his ability to belt out a lung-busting live rendition; opener ‘Cannonball’ a reminder, were it needed, that his back-catalogue – while just three albums deep – is as strong as any in Irish music. There’s something missing, though, from the moment Rice begins a rambling anecdote before ‘The Box’. Rather than forming a connection, it feels as though the self-indulgent musings distance the performer from the crowd.
As a result, some truly brilliant songs sound that little bit empty; ‘Woman Like A Man’, shorn of its primal emotion, is as affecting as Jessie J’s ‘Do It Like A Dude’ (it’s the same message, after all); ‘Amie’, though finding the crowd in fine voice, is more singalong ditty than charged refrain.
But when Rice puts talking aside and allows the music to do the work for him, things step up a gear. ‘My Favourite Faded Fantasy’, ‘I Remember’ and ‘Elephant’ all land with something far closer to the personal intimacy that serves his songs best. ‘Volcano’ has the crowd spellbound, while ‘It Takes A Lot To Know A Man’ builds to a cacophonous crescendo through the use of loop pedals and a vast array of instruments, prompting an actual ‘oboe vs clarinet’ debate between two people beside me (clarinet, for what it’s worth).
By the time a literally unplugged ‘The Blowers Daughter’ is performed without the help of the PA – this time intentionally, to navigate the 11pm curfew – the turnaround is complete. They might not know the man completely, but swooning out of the venue, the crowd certainly seem to like what they’ve seen.