Geronimo

Steve Wickham regularly vied with Edge in the Hot Press best instrumentalist polls of the 80s. The man had stamped his mark on Irish music when he was still a pup, spiking ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ with shards of Raad electric, and later, the climactic loop on Sinead’s ‘I Am Stretched On Your Grave’, but we know him best as the bravura horsehair and locks flying virtuoso of The Waterboys’ trad-rock era. Geronimo, named after his beloved violin, is his first solo album.

The surprise is, he’s got a voice. Wickham had of course done the occasional vocal turn with the Waterboys, but here he’s far more assured, adopting a blue yodel on the opening lackadaisical blues of ‘Lazy Day’. He ain’t no Caruso, but he doesn’t have to be. As a writer, he’s adept at twisting new shapes out of old forms.

So, ‘Midnight Boy’ is the fiddler as nocturnal rambler, walkin’ dude – not the cracked wack job of sociopath balladry, but rather the troubled soul stalking Patsy Cline’s revenant (“I need more love than the town of Dundalk . . . I’ve got twelve o’ clock scribbled on my soul”). On similar terrain, ‘The Hunter’ is a reggaefied cousin of Horslips’ ‘Mad Pat’ by way of Hungarian woodlands, and ‘Three Crows’, pilfered from an old American songbook, binds together sheaves of Waitsian phantasmagoria with Brecht banjo, Irish skipping rhymes and Appalachian field songs. Elsewhere there are tales of innocence regained by way of experience (‘A Snow Year’) that source the music of silence, the sound of one hand clapping and sundry other head-knotting Celtic crypto-riddles.

A glance at the back cover painting by Heidi Wickham will evoke the music more accurately than any assembly of words: ink sky pierced by a green rind of moon, Chagall’s levitating fiddler just out of shot. Steve Wickham considers himself a frustrated guitar player. That’s a scary thought.