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Lee Fisher immerses himself in intimate and emotional evening of socially aware musical storytelling
Image by Thomas Jackson
I first encountered Iona Zajac as part of the Pogues line-up in the spring, proving herself quite the multi-instrumentalist and fully immersing herself in the wonderful chaos. Tonight, it’s just her and her guitars but she’s still really impressive, with a rich voice, a fine playing style and a set of mostly melancholy, sometimes angry, songs. Her account of a trip to SXSW, Is That A Koala, was as funny and well-observed as it was disdainful and we even got a Leonard Cohen cover (One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong) which suited her voice beautifully. If you’ve got a taste for dark, folk-tinged artists like Marisa Nadler, Nina Nastasia and the like, look out for her imminent debut album Bang.
The last time I saw Lisa O’Neill was also at the Pogues gig, making grown men weep with her take on Rainy Night On Soho. Of course, there hasn’t been an O’Neill gig I’ve got through without a few sobs, so no surprise there. It’s a couple of years since I watched people stumble out of her first gig at what was then Sage 2, everybody seeming heartbroken, exhilarated or both, and although much of the material and the band lineup (double bass, hammered dulcimer and harmonium plus her guitar and banjo) was the same, there were vital differences to what might be the most powerful performance I’ve seen from her so far. In the time since that Sage gig, O’Neill has grown in reputation and popularlty and it seems to have made her bolder, more herself, more willing to express the poetic wildness in her.
The explanations of the songs are more intimate, her performance is freer, her anger and her sadness and her lust for life more visible. Throughout the set, which drew heavily on All Of This Is Chance, she referred to ideas about famine, genocide, political violence, immigration, colonisation and more but avoided explicit parallels and let the audience do the work. But she was never didactic and the crowd were with her the whole way. At one point she stepped away from the mic to recite a poem by obscure Irish poet Madge Herron (A Prayer To St Theresa) about a young girl’s unconditional love for her mentally troubled father. It was like a punch in the belly, an absolute heartbreaker, and as we all reeled from it she processed around the venue shaking her Pakistani bells at us in some kind of intimate ritual.
We got songs from her forthcoming Mother Jones EP, including a song about the remarkable Jones herself and a duet with Zajac about Palestine (there was a Palestinian flag draped across her harmonium throughout). She got a standing ovation after the main set and after an impossibly lovely encore of Goodnight World, and the flag was brandished as the band took their bows. I struggle to think of any other artist who is working in such a boldly emotional, poetic and singular manner as Lisa O’Neill. She must be treasured.
