Andrew Curry writes: Mary Black turns 71 this month and has chosen the moment to say ‘farewell’, or ‘slán’ in Irish, with a farewell tour that initially took in 11 concerts at venues across Ireland, south and north, and has now grown to 20 because of the demand for tickets. I saw her at the National Event Centre on the edge of Killarney, in County Kerry in the south-west of Ireland, in the INEC’s 3,000 seater Gleneagle Arena.
She was appearing with her long-standing band—Bill Shanley, her musical director, on guitar, Pat Crowley, on keyboards and accordion, Richie Buckley, on saxophones, Nick Scott on bass, and Liam Bradley, on drums.
The place is packed. Some people next to us in the foyer, while waiting for the doors to open, had travelled across Ireland from Dublin because her Dublin concerts were quick to sell out.
Because it’s a farewell tour, Mary Black chooses her songs and stories to reflect on her 45-year career. In the first half, for example, she says kind things about Declan Sinnott, who produced her first album in 1983 (“I was as green as grass”) and collaborated with her for more than a decade. The song she chooses from her Mary Black album is unexpected: Lovin’ You, by The Loving Spoonful. She’d heard it on the radio and asked Sinnott if she could record it.
It’s a bit of a honky-tonk version of Lovin’ You, and the band shifts a gear as they go into Shane Howard’s song Don’t Say OK, giving the protest song something of a funk vibe.
There’s a nod to Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose song The Moon and St Christopher has been part of her repertoire for three decades now. And a story about the recording of Sonny, an audience favourite, which she recorded when on a kind of reverse Transatlantic Sessions in which a group of Irish musicians visited Nashville in the early 1990s to play songs with the locals. The first version of this featured Emmy Lou Harris and Dolores Keane. She takes a moment to pay her respects to Keane, who died in March, before inviting us to join in with the chorus.
As she says on stage, she was perhaps lucky—although you make your own luck, since who would not want Mary Black to record one of your songs?— that her career coincided with a crop of gifted Irish songwriters who were happy to have her record their songs. She pays tribute to some of these. Jimmy MacCarthy, obviously, with whom she recorded a whole record of his songs. The set includes several MacCarthy numbers, including the iconic No Frontiers, which closes the first half.
But she spent more time talking about Noel Brazil, who died at the relatively young age of 46. Brazil was best known for sadder songs, but the first of his songs in the set was one of his few upbeat numbers, The Land of Love. I’d noticed, when listening to the Anthology collection that she has compiled from across her career to mark the Slán tour, how many of the songs benefit from Richie Buckley’s saxophone playing.
But hearing him on The Land of Love you realise what a fantastic player he is, with rich fills and complex solos.
Before she and the band came on stage, the County Clare singers Trevor Sexton and Ger O’Donnell appeared, at Mary Black’s invitation, to play a few songs. I’m guessing that they had appeared with her in Limerick the night before as well. It’s a tough ask to come on when the hall is full of people waiting to see the main attraction.
But they defused this well, first by explaining that Mary has asked them to sing the first song, Stardust, written by Shay Healey, because it was a particular favourite of hers, and then by being very funny. As they go into a Paul Brady song, they say, “If you know this one, please don’t sing along because you’ll ruin it.” I’d definitely go to see them again.
In the second half of the show the pace picks up, helped along by a medley of six songs that starts with the old Scots ballad Anachie Gordon and ends with Bacharach and David’s Say A Little Prayer. It’s a way of squeezing some extra favourites into the show.
As she moves through the gears towards the conclusion, there a couple more Jimmy MacCarthy songs, including Katie. As she goes into Mountains to the Sea, with its train-track rhythms, she pauses between the opening lines to say, “That’s been my life for the last 40 years.”
The lines?
Working coast to coast, sleeping on a train
Caught between the settled life, and on the road again.
No Mary Black concert—farewell tour or not—would be complete without A Woman‘s Heart. The song was the title track of the biggest selling Irish album of all time, and brought together some of the leading Irish women singers and performers of the early 1990s. It was written by Eleanor McEvoy, who duets with Black on the record.
At the time, McEvoy was a young musician playing in Mary Black‘s band. When Black heard McEvoy play the song, she suggested to the producers that it would be a perfect addition to the record.
Mary Black has marked the tour by releasing a three disc Anthology from across her career, although not all of the songs in the show come from the record. It’s possible to detect that at 71 her range is not quite what it was, and that her voice has lost a little of the pure quality that meant it was once used to benchmark audio systems, but that’s more from listening to the songs on Anthology before the show, and noticing the ones she chose not to sing in the concert.
There’s few of her distinctive ballads here, for instance. She’s helped in all of this by the fact that the band is outstanding. I had the impression, afterwards, that perhaps she and her musical director, Bill Shanley, had picked out songs that showcased her current voice most effectively—and I’d rather this than listening to someone trying to reach more youthful peaks and failing.
Towards the end of the set, she went into Noel Brazil‘s song about emigration, Ellis Island, which was also used to showcase the contribution of each of the members of the band, each taking a solo spot. The song is not an obvious choice to carry that weight, but it worked surprisingly well.
For the encore: the Dylan song Forever Young, with Ger O’Donnell and Trevor Sexton back on stage.
I wasn’t fond of the Ticketmaster part of the concert experience—not their 20 percent mark up on the ticket price, or being locked into their app to get into the venue, or that the tickets quoted a door time but didn’t tell me when the concert would actually start. I didn’t need to be hanging around the frankly grim Gleneagle Arena for an hour to make sure I didn’t miss the beginning of the concert. But monopolists are as monopolists do.
But Mary Black and the band were a lot better value than Ticketmaster. They were on stage for something like two hours, and played a lot of her classic tracks. By my calculations, they will have played to something like a tenth of the population of Ireland, across the south and the north, by the time they finally say slán. That’s quite the way to say goodbye.
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