Lankum – Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow: Live Review

By Seuras Og on 4th February 2024 • ( 1 Comment )

Lankum @ Celtic Connections Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow – 3rd February, 2024

As you trudge down the old main drag to the Barras vicinity of Glasgow, there are few more welcoming beacons than the garish flashing neon of this fabled Glasgow institution, easily one of higher ranking 10 venues you must see before you die. My will beginning to diminish in the dreich of the drizzle, suddenly all was again well with the world. Old main drag? Well, we’ll get to that.

So, Lankum, eh? A bit of a big old year for the Dublin indefinables, what with False Lankum, their album, hitting the top end of near, if not all, best of/year end lists. (Of course it was in ours!) Winners, too, of the Mercury Music Prize, as was. (OK, 2nd, but who’s going to remember Ezra Collective pipped them to the post?) With live shows selling out such venues as London’s Roundhouse, and garnishing plaudits from the nationals, how would the fabled audience of this most individual of cities take to them? They’ve been before, mind, and have the hangovers to prove it, the band up and up for it just as much as the voracious roomful of punters.

First up was the contrast of Rachael Lavelle, a lone figure, ahead a hefty slab of electronic keyboard. Playing and programming ghostly funereal chords, interspersed with slow gut-shuddering beats, it was her voice that was the clear focus. Like a prayer meeting held in the dark, in secret, she intoned mantric verses, hand movements in slo-mo her only concession to performance. Quite the link with the main act, I am uncertain, although I guess it is in the preponderance of drone tones in her music, which already scuppers my aspiration to tonight to try and avoid the ‘d’ word. For me, all a bit Quietus, but, I was in a minority, as the audience were not short in their admiration and apparent enjoyment.

There are few bands where the stage gets darker as they come on. Already we had seen the four chairs, with side tables of kit, spread equidistant across the stage. What looked like a drum kit lay in further shadows, at the back. The cheer, as the lights dimmed further, and the four silhouetted figures shambled on, was huge. Greeting the audience with a raised hand, Ian Lynch couldn’t contain his glee at being here, for a full on Saturday night out experience in Glasgow. Starting with their gaunt reconstruction of The Wild Rover, it was Radie Peat’s voice that was almost the only sound, bar a low thrum of sonics. A clear and potent siren, she has that shot of harsh citrus tones that make her singing so delicious. All threat here, rather than the maudlin drinking song it has usually become, this was anguish and regret akin to self-immolation. When the male voices of her bandmates joined in, in deep and tattered counterpoint, flashes of bright light flashed for every crashing beat. Oo-er, maybe this drinking lark isn’t all they big it up to be, after all…

Actually, maybe not, as most of the subsequent stage banter, mainly from Ian, with asides from his brother, Daragh, and from Peat, revolved around drink and its associated effects and aftermath. When in Glasgow, etc. Plus a lot of well-aimed jibes against the peddlers of war and the plight of the people affected, Sunak and the Palestinians, respectively, the full Dublin vernacular as colourful as the stage wasn’t. Songwise, the set interspersed instrumental circulations, sonic texture more important than tonal variation, and songs drawn from the tradition, and that would not sound amiss in a session at Devitt’s. The former tend to use Cormac Mac Diarmada’s fiddle as almost percussion, the melodies spare and repetitive, with Peat’s harmonium adding ballast. Concertina would then add a sweeter richness, occasionally whistle and uillean pipes, but never for any sense of virtuoso, more in the way you add logs to a fire. A particularly memorable climax had Daragh Lynch thrashing his guitar with a bowstring. Think a demented Jimmy Page, but with an acoustic, OK, heavily miked up and on the full 11 distort, playing in anger rather than for effect. Stunning! Many of the song songs featured the robust rawness of Daragh Lynch’s vocal, such as his rendition of his own song, The Young People. Not so much about the joy of youth, I might add, it a cautionary tale of self-harm and suicide, that was as magnificently bleak as the sweet picking of his guitar. Earlier, his bother had sung us, figuratively, through the wild Atlantic, with another tale of distress, The New York Trader, his deeper voice a foghorn of atmosphere.

Thoughts were with those no longer with us, with, first up, a tribute to Sinead O’Connor. A largely instrumental piece, Lullaby, it wasn’t, the gentleness brittle with spiky off-key filters. Traditional air, Pride Of Petravore, then got perhaps the most conventional presentation of anything thus far, showing the grounding this group has in hardcore sessioneering, the lifeblood of Irish music. Sticking with tradition, or fooling me into first thinking it, a familar tune, on whistle, eked itself out of some industrial hardcore noise frenzy. A shock as I realised it was a Sting song, his We Work The Black Seam. To be fair, Lankum are not the first to find it a song of substance and beauty, this version maybe more akin to the Battlefield Band’s version, should they have ever fallen into the brown acid in error. (Ian Lynch then revealed the song’s author, almost as in FFS, with an amusing anecdote of his meeting with the great man, of entirely his own disturbed imagination.)

Worth a mention here of the percussionist, John Dermody, who had snuck on under the prevailing undercover of darkness, providing all the resounding tom toms, bass drum, gongs and cymbal anyone might ever need, applying a rare economy so as to maximise his sporadic interventions. No extra trumpet or piano tonight, neither missed nor, possibly, even needed, even if old trumpet lover me might have hoped for the former.

My notes now no help at all, memory fails to remind me quite where the set ended and the encore began, even despite Daragh Lynch’s prolonged explanation of the etiquette: “this is our last song, but of course we’re feckin’ coming back.” Me, I blame the precautionary beforehand at St. Lukes, another Glasgow venue icon, visited purely to tick that list. Be that as it may, Peat got her second show stopper of the night, the stonking, and initially acapella Go Dig My Grave, the opening track from False Lankum that so firmly nailed the album to the mast of all-conquering. The background chatter, for the first time, hushed completely, and all ears were addressed the stage. As, gradually, up came the build, the crashes, the bangs, the thunderclap percussion and lightning strike flashes, this was a top-notch synopsis of quite what or why are Lankum.

Shane MacGowan had several mentions throughout the night, their commemoration to his memory and to his legacy as heartfelt as it was sweary, in keeping the man. Their slowed version of The Old Main Drag drew out the agony of the lyrics, and I am sure that MacGowan would have approved, imagining he, and probably Sinead, in Irish Valhalla, would be feeling their time on this earth to have been duly shown to have been of some purpose. Bear Creek, as jittery as it jaunty, then closed proceedings, beckoning doors and lights. Mag-bloody-nificent!!!

(It has to be, doesn’t it!)