Recommended Listening - Christy Moore

I picked up 2 Christy Moore albums recently. Burning Times is his latest offering. It is very good. Declan Sinnott is sharing the bill. He sings a mixture of songs by Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson as well as some new songs from one of his regular song writers, Wally Page. It is a very polished set of songs from Christy, and is worth putting on the Christmas list.

The second album I picked up is the 6 disc box set which he issued last year. This is a collection of out-takes, recordings at concerts, a few monologues. Some of the old recordings are poor quality, in one or two from the sixties you can hardly recognise the voice, as Christy's. But the overall result is a very powerful, personal and intimate set of recordings, very raw, but very Christy. There are some great song introductions, some of the live recordings really capture the atmosphere at a Chrisy Moore gig. Of course, you have the usual examples of Christy's extreme politics, but it's clearly from the heart even if it's hard to take. Great for a long car journey.

Maybe you have to be from Newbridge to really appreciate Christy - though Newbridge people represent such a small part of his fan base that this can't be true!

Listening to some of the introductions and monologues on the box set, I know that most of his fans can't know the local places and characters he mentions. He talks about a gig in San Francisco where a couple of "Newbridge heads" couldn't get tickets. They broken down the stage door to get into the gig and had to be ejected by the "crowd control engineers". Now I don't know who they were - I hadn't heard the story before, - but I know at least 2 people from Newbridge, living in San Francisco, who are probably mad enough to have tried such a stunt. I'm convinced it was Stan or Henner!

I suppose to the non Newbridge fan, the characters and places just give an intimate feel - the difference is that if your from Newbridge you can see the real people and places - the other fans just have to use their imagination.

Strongly recommended.