Andrew Curry writes: The Irish singer and songwriter Oisin Leech has been getting deserved coverage for his record Cold Sea, released last year. He’s on a short tour of England at the moment, and I was able to see him live at the start of that tour in London last week.
(Cold Sea album cover. Painting by Sinead Smyth.)
A little bit after eight o’clock, Steve Gunn ambles out on the stage at London’s Bush Hall to play a few solo numbers by way of a warm-up for Oisin Leech. He’ll be coming back after the break to play with Leech and the bass player, Graham Heaney, but for now he shares a few of his songs, along with an engaging cover of the Velvet Underground’s I’ll be Your Mirror.
Steve Gunn is an accomplished guitarist who produces a bright, warm sound from his acoustic, enhanced by some washes of effects from time to time via a foot pedal.
Of course, Oisin Leech (pronounced ‘Oy-shin’) is the main attraction here, on the strength of an outstanding debut album last year. That narrative is deceptive, though: he’s made seven records as part of the Irish duo The Lost Brothers, and also hosts an RTE radio show called Caravan Radio.
Cold Sea creates a strong sense of Irish place. It was recorded over four or five days in a cottage in Donegal overlooking the Atlantic, which makes it sound a bit like The Atlantic Sessions, and many of the songs evoke Donegal. Malin’s Gales is about Malin Head, Ireland’s most northerly point; the cottage overlooked Trawbeaga Bay; Maritime Tales is an instrumental with the Irish shipping forecast interlaced as a found sound (taped from the radio, apparently).
Gunn produced the record, and played guitar on it, along with the bass player Tony Garnier, M Ward on guitar, and appearances by Roisin McGrory and Donal Lunny (on a couple of tracks), among others,
Here in the Bush Hall it’s just the three of them, and it seems that it’s a bit of a special appearance by Steve Gunn, who’s not joining Leech and Heaney for the rest of the tour, but it works well. It’s an intimate, old-fashioned venue, with much of the decor intact from its days as a late Victorian music hall, which is most of the reason why it hasn’t been knocked down and turned into a minimart.
In the room, that sense of place is amplified by the paintings of the Donegal artist Sinead Smyth, whose work adorns the cover of Cold Sea.
She has provided images of a stack of her work, and these are projected onto the back of the stage, evoking the mountains, sea, clouds and weathers of the north of Ireland.
I think that one of the reasons that Cold Sea has attracted attention is that tonally and musically it feels like its own world, but all the same there are some standout tracks.
October Sun, now approaching one million hits on Spotify, is a standout in the set as well, and he slots it in early on. One Hill Further conjures impressionistic images of loss and movement:
Running northwards, refugee/ You call it hiding, I call it sympathy.
He takes a while, later on, to tune his guitar for The Colour of the Rain, the final number in the main set, and explains that when he started writing it, it was four in the morning, he was watching Match of the Day, and his kids had knocked over his guitar and sent it out of tune.
In all of this, Steve Gunn has traded his warm-up act acoustic for an electric guitar, and fills in some subtle lines and licks, and sometimes more than that, while Graham Heaney’s stand-up bass fills out the sound, switching sometimes to bowing to create a different tone.
Between the songs from the record, there’s quite a lot of variety. There’s an instrumental (I didn’t catch the name) where Leech joins Steve Gunn on electric guitar, and they conjure the spirit of Bill Frisell’s record of blues and folk songs, The Willies, abstracting the tune.
(Oisin Leech on stage at Bush Hall; Steve Gunn is to his left. Photo Sue Robinson: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)
Early on in the set, Leech had added some delicate harmonica to one of the songs, and he brings it back later to demonstrate that he’s pretty adept on the instrument, swapping it in in place of his guitar on another instrumental track.
He paid his dues busking in Liverpool and Naples, he explains at one point, and I can imagine that some harmonica chops helps you cut through when you’re playing on the street.
There’s also a striking cover of Dylan’s As I Walked Out One Morning, slowed right down from Dylan’s jaunty approach on John Wesley Harding, so slow that it sounds like an old murder ballad from this side of the Atlantic, as if Leech is intent on reclaiming the song for our tradition, underlining the roots that Dylan drew on to write it.
Leech is well known as a huge Dylan fan, and I was as sure as I could be that one of the songs he played in his massively deserved encore was an instrumental version of Queen Jane Approximately, not so much re-interpreted as completely deconstructed. He didn’t announce the song so I’m going off the chord changes and some of the fills.
This was followed by an a capella version of a traditional song in which a man wonders which part of Europe his love might now be in—“England, France or Spain”—without asking too much why she might be as far away from him as she can get. And then he closed with Wild Mountain Thyme. And after that we skipped through the purple heather back onto the Uxbridge Road, pausing briefly to pick up a disc from the merch stall and thank Leech for a fine concert.
Oisin Leech and Graham Heaney—probably without Steve Gunn—still have a few dates between now and the end of March on their short English tour: Oxford, Lyme Regis, Falmouth, and Totnes, on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, respectively, and then Sheffield on Sunday. And—as if to underline how big he is in Ireland—there’s a show in Dublin in April at the National Concert Hall. Tour information is here. Catch him if you can.
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If you like folk, folk-rock or acoustic music, do visit the Salut! Live Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2902595146676633/.
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