King of his own songbook, Jimmy MacCarthy holds the National Concert Hall spellbound

By the time Jimmy MacCarthy released his debut album, The Song of the Singing Horseman, in 1991, several of its songs were already familiar through other voices. Christy Moore had made ‘Ride On’ the title track of his 1984 album, produced by Dónal Lunny. Moore’s Voyage followed in 1989, gathering three more MacCarthy compositions – ‘Mystic Lipstick’, ‘Missing You’ and ‘Bright Blue Rose’.

Maura O’Connell also recorded ‘Mystic Lipstick’ on Always that year, while Mary Black brought ‘No Frontiers’ to a wider audience as the title track of her 1989 album, before recording ‘Bright Blue Rose’ for Babes in the Wood in 1991; both albums were produced by Declan Sinnott. The Corrs subsequently recorded ‘No Frontiers’ for their 1999 Unplugged album, with Sharon and Caroline sharing lead vocals.

Tonight, MacCarthy and his magnificent ensemble – marvellously directed by MD and pianist David Hayes and with the incomparable Anto Drennan on guitar – perform the record in full and in sequence, a mighty treat that reveals how deeply his songs have woven themselves into Irish life, often reaching us first in somebody else’s interpretation. He sits centre stage casually chatting with the crowd, supplying each song with an introduction, sometimes reading, sometimes wandering into another recollection. His conversational routes trek through England, Switzerland and Cork, with spiritual speculation and old musical acquaintances encountered along the way.

“We opened for The Flying Burrito Brothers,” Jimmy recalls of a previous Dublin gig at the National Stadium – not a sentence you hear every day and delivered as casually as if he were remembering a lift into town; then he reads Beckett – “Perhaps my best years are gone... But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now” – and the band launches into ‘On My Enchanted Sight’ and we’re off.

Introducing ‘Mystic Lipstick’, a modern aisling that imagines Ireland as a woman carrying the wounds of history, MacCarthy reflects on colonial rule, economic hardship and emigration. Then epic ‘Missing You’, rooted in his time on Arlington Road in Camden, brings those histories down to the scale of a rented room, hard graft, manic drinking and a life built far from home. Its ache remains staggering and undiminished – and you reckon that surely everyone in this audience will find someone within the song – a brother, an aunt, an old friend who crossed the water and didn’t find the streets paved with gold.

Marvellous it is to hear ‘Ride On’ in its creator’s voice, a song so deeply embedded in Irish musical consciousness, as a result of towering versions by Mary Coughlan and Christy Moore, that familiarity might easily obscure its strangeness. Tonight, MacCarthy opens it up again, challenging received interpretations and introducing two new verses. In his recent Hot Press interview with Lucy O’Toole, he recalled his unease at a girl-friends involvement in a radical Marxist-Leninist organisation.

He distinguished Republican movements born of partition from imported revolutionary models such as Italy’s Red Brigades. “I had prescience, with regard to this,” he told her. “I was having strange dreams – and I wrote ‘Ride On’.” Tonight drummer Paul McAteer plays with exquisite restraint, while piano and strings gather gently etching space for the sacred words that every soul in Ireland knows by rote.

Ditto ‘No Frontiers’. MacCarthy recalls walking from Basel into Saint-Louis, where a demand for his papers and a border sign supplied the beginnings of a song. His thoughts turn to his mother, whose six-minute pleasure flight over Cork became a consuming ambition. She was ten hours short of qualifying as a pilot when pregnancy, and her husband’s prohibition, brought her flying to an end. The Amelia of the lyric invokes Earhart, but carries something of his mother, too.

Elsewhere, Casey’s exposed fiddle, and flamenco handclaps from Hayes, open a passage into ‘The Mad Lady and Me’ hauling us back to the banks of the River Lee, while ‘The Grip of Parallel’ travels through the strange geography of Hopi jewellery, Venice and pyramids in Sneem - its jaunty rhythmic swagger channelling a fine cabaret.

Then comes, beyond mighty, ‘The Bright Blue Rose’ – is there a more beautiful song in the Ireland canon, indeed in any canon? MacCarthy’s Jesus is a human figure, a mystic and philosopher whose influence has endured for two millennia. The young man on the banks of an urban morning is the songwriter himself, newly sober and beginning to imagine a different existence. The song’s essence, he explains, is alchemy – the possibility of turning a base life into something precious. That account provides its elusive imagery with autobiographical heft. Beneath the spiritual searching is the difficult, practical business of learning how to live again, carried by a melody he considers his finest.

By now, the riches seem almost preposterous. ‘As I Leave Behind Neidín’, MacCarthy explains, is not quite the emigration song it is generally taken for. His recollection of a summer drive through Connemara loosens it from that familiar reading, although its tenderness towards a place being left behind remains.

‘The Contender’ follows, tracing the rise and ruin of boxer and singer Jack Doyle. Here was a life almost too extravagant for invention – beauty, celebrity, greatness and then the long descent towards pennilessness on London’s streets. MacCarthy gives that distance between youthful promise and final circumstance a devastating human scale.

‘Roll On the Lee’ carries us back to Cork, whose streets, river and characters have run through the evening even when the songs have travelled elsewhere. A magic evening altogether. Jimmy Abú!