Everything’s gone green. From the cover of John Francis Flynn’s latest album, Look Over the Wall, See the Sky, as it sits proudly on the merch table in The Crescent, to the strong imaginative sense of Irish culture that pervades the venue tonight. Flynn, that giant of a man from Dublin is here, of course. As too is his fellow city dweller, Kevin Fowley. The Franco-Irish musician also shares with Flynn founding membership of the contemporary Irish folk band, Skipper’s Alley. And if we are to use height, long hair, and a beard as our barometers of similarity, then there is also more than a passing resemblance between the two men.
“That’s the only English you’re getting out of me,” suggests Kevin Fowley after his first tune before proceeding to sing the rest of his set in French. Given they are all adaptations of lullabies from France which date back half a millennium that probably makes perfect sense. Taken from his recent EP À Feu Deux, they are songs he first heard as a young boy when listening to his grandparents sing them to him. Then they were sweet and dreamy. Older now, Fowley realises they were actually all about death and sex.
Accompanied by his regular collaborators Ross Chaney (drums, tape machines, and synths) and Brendan Jenkinson (guitar, clarinet), John Francis Flynn begins with the slightly ribald ‘The Zoological Gardens,’ the opening track from Look Over the Wall, See the Sky. With words written by the Irish writer and singer Dominic Behan and previously recorded by The Dubliners and The Wolf Tones, the song embodies the very essence of Flynn’s art whereby he takes traditional Irish folk songs and radically repurposes them for the present day.
John Francis Flynn says many of these songs just travel through time and people and, as a result, change. As a prime example of this metamorphosis, he references ‘Bring Me Home’ – from his debut album, 2021’s I Would Not Live Always – which had started life as an Irish rebel song before slowly transmuting over the years into a romantic ballad.
In Flynn’s mercurial hands this process of evolution is accelerated. He has become a supreme sonic alchemist for the modern age, replacing the more traditional arrangements of these storied songs with a framework of synths, tape loops, and electronic noise. The impact is startling, possibly no more so than on ‘Kitty’ – which had appeared on The Pogues’ first album Red Roses for Me – as it disappears into a vortex of explosive guitar courtesy of Brendan Jenkinson.
Kevin Fowley returns to the stage for the final song of the evening, adding gentle harmonies to John Francis Flynn’s deeply sonorous voice on what is an exquisite reading of the old sea shanty ‘Shallow Brown.’ It brings to a fitting close a perfect demonstration of the synthesis of songs and sound, of how to relocate the musical past into the present.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos from this show are HERE
