Ride On

After his divorce from Moving Hearts, dejection must have seemed almost like a friend to Christy Moore.

For that great experiment he had turned his back on certainty, taking an enormous burden on his shoulders and voyaging into the unknown. Musically, it was a challenging, even dangerous mission. Could a man with folk music in his blood front an electric band capable of becoming Ireland's most significant of all time, bar none? Christy Moore invested so much heart and so much energy in that campaign only to bow out with ambitions half-fulfilled at best. With one inescapable further consequence: that his future solo work would inevitably invite comparison with the dizzy heights to which Moving Hearts aspired. Returning to the role of journeyman solo folk singer seemed like a long and lonely option to have to choose.

But, rather than letting the Moving Heats experience define his limitations, Christy, has used the break as a catalyst. Unwilling to turn the clock back, instead he found a new way forward finally beginning to explore his potential as a songwriter. In this respect he has come of age on Ride On, his first post-Moving Hearts solo album. If his recent self-penned singles have been whimsical ('Knock') and literal ('The Wicklow Boy'), Lisdoonvarna is simply superb, unimpeachably so. A whacking great canvas, Breughel-like in its epic dimensions. It captures the madness and the mayhem of Ireland's greatest ever music festival with affectionate humour and cutting insight. "The multitude they flocked in throng", the lyrics read on the sleeve, "to hear music and the songs, on motor-bikes and Hiace vans, with bottles, barrels, flagons, cans, mighty crack and loads of frolics, pioneers and alcoholics, PLAC, SPUC and the FCA, Free Nicky Kelly and the IRA, Hairy chests and milk-white thighs, Mickey Dodgers in disguise, McGraths, O'Briens, Pippins, Cox's Massage Parlours in horse boxes, Arab sheiks, Hindu Sikhs, Jesus freaks, RTE makin' tapes, takin’ breaks, throwin' shapes, this is heaven this is hell, who cares who can tell? Anyone for the last few choc ices…" The recorded version runs slightly differently but no matter: this is the legendary wit which has made Christy Moore one of the most formidable and popular live performers in the country, harnessed to marvellous effect.

His other song 'Vive La Quinte Brigade' is politically sound as a bell, if a touch guileless. What is most impressive in terms of Christ's development as a writer is the evocative chorus, given an effective Tex mex warmth by the combination of Donal Lunny's Prophet – sounding like an accordion – Declan Sinnott's many guitars and the threesomes wholehearted singing.

The other revelations are Bobby Sand's songs 'McIlhatton' and 'Back Home In Derry'. The first is a humorous piece of revelry which captures the hallucinogenic aspect of a poitin binge well: "There's a wisp of smoke to the south of the glen and the poitin is in the air, the birds are in the burrows and there's rabbits in the sky and there's drunkards everywhere". But 'Back Home In Derry' is altogether more poignant. About a bunch of sixty Irish rebels transported to Australia in 1803, the song becomes much more as it describes the atrocious squalor of their imprisonment: "Five weeks out to sea we were now 43, we buried out comrades each morning, in our own slime we were lost in a time, endless night without dawning." The reverberations are chilling.

'The City Of Chicago' (Barry Moore), 'The Dying Soldier' (Ger Costello), 'Wicklow Hills' (Pierce Turner) and 'El Salvador' (Johnny Duhan) all are good songs, without being exceptional. I'm less impressed with 'The Least We Can Do' and the version of W.B. Yeats 'The Song Of Wandering Aongus'. And oddly enough 'Ride On', the title track of which Christy thinks so highly, seems curiously insubstantial lyrically. The arrangement however is magnificent, particularly Declan Sinnott's liquid, silver keening electric guitar which wrings oceans of emotion out of a beautiful cameo performance.

Sinnott's guitar playing throughout is superb, while Donal Lunny's production highlights the strengths of Christy's big, finely-matured voice. Through keeping things simple, where voices or instruments are given space, they have all the more opportunity to shine. In this subtle and uncluttered way, 'Ride On' hangs together.

If the balance of the songs was just a little bit stronger, it'd be jockeying for classic status. Next time, maybe Christy's own level of productivity will be sufficient to allow him to dispense with anything other than stone-gone gems.

In the meantime Christy Moore has proven that when the going gets tough, the tough get writing. Write on!