A hard rian's gonna fall

With the release of Rian a couple of years back Liam O Maonlai stepped out of his own shadow. He was able to leave to one side the influences that inspired and informed him as part of Hothouse Flowers and instead embrace a radically different musical agenda.

An eclectic foray into Irish traditional music, Rian exuded an air of freshness while at the same time sounding like a long lost Gael Linn LP where Jackie Daly goes head-to-head with Donal Lunny.
Well, he's done it again. Talking about his latest album, To Be Touched, O Maonlai lists an encyclopaedic array of world music styles, saying the record is a sort of ‘birthing of influences through the medium of song’.
He also drops in, almost in passing, the fact that he uses his favourite instrument, the piano, as ‘a landscape for the wandering voice’. Personally, I tend to run a mile from statements like this (humour me, I’m from the North). But as he’s a really nice guy with talent running off him like rainwater I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Turns out, I made the correct decision, as his songs are fantastic. Mostly recorded in Prague last July with the companionship and help of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the record features Marketa on guest vocals along with Martin Brunsden on upright bass.
Resisting the temptation to slather the proceedings liberally with the sort of schmaltz that has turned Colin Devlin’s songwriting into sub-Snow Patrol goo, he has ended up with an elastic, living and breathing intimacy that invites you to actually listen to what he’s saying.
He’s also getting out and about for a smattering of live shows. And being a traditional Irish musician at heart, he’ll be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a few pints of the green stuff at El Feile in Barcelona. He’s on stage in Belgium the following evening with a gig at the Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe. There are Irish dates as well – he’s in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre on Wednesday March 25, in Dolans Warehouse in Limerick on Friday March 27 and in Cork’s Pavilion Theatre on Wednesday April 1.
You have to have a sneaking respect for a man who, given the choice between attending the world premiere of a major feature length documentary on his life and sunning himself in Florida, decides that he can live without the glitz and glamour. So we were left in the very capable hands of the film’s director Alan Gilsenan when the Yellow Bittern – The Life and Times of Liam Clancy made its public debut at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
Clocking in at roughly 100 minutes the film has enough live footage to please Liam’s fans but it’s much more than a run-of-the-mill music documentary, putting the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem in context against the backdrop of the unravelling politics of America in the mid 1960s, deftly highlighting how they, like many of their generation, helped build the foundations of a multi-racial society in the US by seeking out their musical peers and heroes irrespective of their colour or creed. Without attempting to mythologise him the film offers him up as the complex character he is.
Still gigging at 73, Liam has a number of Irish shows over the coming months beginning with the Opera House in Cork on Sunday April 5.
If Gram Parsons was the poster boy for country-rock, then Jackson Browne could be said to occupy broadly the same position in the folk–rock pantheon. Like Parsons, he started his career as a member of a seminal band – in his case a brief stint in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – before carving out a niche as a solo performer. Both had very public relationships with fellow singers. In Parsons’ case this yielded the searing, haunting duets with Emmylou Harris that are the highpoint of his two solo albums. In Browne’s case the indelible legacy was his contributions to Nico’s Chelsea Girl album, including one surefire classic in ‘These Days’. Unlike Parsons, though, the more introspective Californian didn’t flare briefly and brightly but rather released a string of quietly and increasingly more assured albums over the course of the ’70s, building to the breakthrough of Running On Empty. In the early ’80s, though, his career went into decline as his increasingly vocal social conscience sat ill at ease with the prevailing climate in Reaganite America. Through the ’90s and into the new century, he released a string of albums in which the songs once again leaned away from the political and back to more personal issues, although his own convictions remained unchanged, his dedication to the anti-nuclear cause in particular undiminished.
He returns now with the aptly named Time The Conqueror and will be washing up in Ireland for three dates, the first in Belfast’s Ulster Hall on Saturday March 21 followed by a brace of
shows in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre
on Monday March 23 and
Tuesday 24.