Music / Reviews
Review: John Francis Flynn, The Exchange – ‘Poignant and pure’
“To know someone’s culture, you just have to sing a song. Or listen to one”. So says John Francis Flynn, Dublin’s next folk star.
He’s a huge man with a voice seemingly dragged from under-ground. Tonight, he is thoughtful, gentle, experimental, intense and fierce. He is, also, determined to display the depth and colour of his culture.
Flynn explores the traditions of Ireland through heroes that have gone before. We get a song by Christy Moore, one made famous by The Dubliners, two popularised by Shane MacGowan and The Pogues.
is needed now More than ever
We get snap-shots of Dublin and mentions of Tralee. So far, so traditional, but Flynn is avowedly against “Paddywhackery” so he takes these old favourites and twists them, smashes them, swathes them in electronics and dischord. They pulse with life, become vital.
The Zoological Gardens, taken from his brilliant Look Over the Wall, See the Sky album, is dream-like, it’s woozy and weird, skeletal and surreal, full of double meanings and itchy metaphors.
Flynn’s warm voice sits among a spider-y guitar line and bowed double bass as electronics whoop and echo. In just the same way that The Dubliners took tradition and asked us to look at these songs again, Flynn has a foot in the past whilst striding forward.
For seventy-five minutes, Flynn and his band wrestle two traditions to fuse writhing, thrashing things together. Tralee Gaol is an old tune which Flynn plays, almost, straight and solo. Admittedly he plays it on two tin whistles taped together but it rages with breathless intensity.
My Son Tim is another trad Irish song, an anti-war belter full of “fol-de-fiddle-ah”s and upbeat danceability. Flynn keeps things simple, his corner-of-the-pub voice rumbling away with his strummed guitar.
It’s his band that creates mayhem and fire though. Thrashed guitars, clattering drums, a double bass that leaps and scurries. They make a mighty noise.
The smart use of electronics is thrilling. Kitty – learnt from The Pogues’ version – is heart-beat slow, filled with clarinet drones and echo-y beats. By the end you’d swear that there was a hint of dub in there too. No wonder Bristol loved it.
Willy Crotty is intense and juddering, an electronic hydraulic-press crushing the breath from the room. Flynn’s voice is fuzzed-up and slurred, spooky and uncomfortable. There are some traditional Irish roots buried at the base but Flynn’s band push, pull, smother and scrape until there’s something new triumphantly emerging.
To keep everyone on their toes, The Seasons has an almost Van Morrison jazzy feel to it. Scatter-y drums and a walking bass provide a lightness which Flynn then undermines as he, deliberately, sings a fraction of a beat out.
Suddenly the polite becomes odd. It then slides further as the Frankenstein tin whistle is employed in a fearsome battlefield whirl. Clarinet drones and thrashed drums obliterate the comfortable.
A crunchy, scrunchy Within a Mile of Dublin scatters sheets of white electronic noise, discomfort and euphoria are perfectly joined.
Flynn’s final act is to entirely overhaul Dirty Old Town, Ewan MacColl’s beloved standard. In a move entirely in-keeping with the whole evening, he ditches the band, the electronics, the noise.
He turns whatever we expect upside down. Instead, it’s slow and lovely. The lyrics poured over, it’s poignant and pure. Flynn’s eyes are closed and he holds us all in the palm of his hand.
If this evening is a fair representation of Dublin’s current culture, just listening to Flynn’s songs is the very least that we should do.
Main photo: Gavin McNamara
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