Dermot Kennedy – Spark Arena, 29 November 2023: Review

Dermot Kennedy unleashes a powerful blue-eyed Soul voice to captivate the large mid-week Spark Arena crowd.

He sings with passion and intensity which effortlessly fills the large auditorium.

He comes from Rathcoole in County Dublin, Ireland. I think it is safe to say these days that at least in vocal power, he is kin to the Belfast Cowboy and purveyor of Caldonian Soul Van Morrison.

Writing songs at age 14, and busking from 17, he made steady progress in the music industry with sheer hard work. Studied classical music at university for three years, but it was from the streets that he molded his craft.

He is a singer-songwriter primarily, performing solo with an acoustic guitar. There was a band along the way, Shadows and Dust.

The basic template of the songs we experience are with opening number Blossoms. Folk lyrics which explore the Wildean idea that the purpose of life is suffering. All meaning, especially love, comes through this.

He is more earnest than that other Irishman Morrissey. He has the heart on his sleeve like Stuart Adamson with Big Country. Who was Scottish but the Celtic heritage is there.

The big guitars-as-bagpipes trademark sound is replicated in intensity with Kennedy’s voice.

Power Over Me. There is a five-piece band behind him. Big echoing bombastic drums anchor many of the songs and give depth, like the Womack and Womack albums. That’s the Soul heartbeat.

One Life. Is never long enough. A perfect performance of intense Folk. All your troubles, all your pain/ Let me struggle, let me carry that weight.

An Evening I Will Not Forget. Starts in a lower vocal register with just piano and builds majestically. Kennedy says he has incorporated Hip-Hop and Rap in his music. There are some echoes here and in other songs.

What he possibly does is take the punching power of NWA, where lyrics are emotional and angry, and magnify that intensity further around a Folk tradition. Intriguing however you look at it.

Dreamer is a highlight in this sense. Extraordinary vocals echoing the coruscating emotional style of Eminem.

After that the seven-league-boots musical journeys with the darkness banished by divine light just keep rolling out.

Innocence and Sadness, After Rain, Outnumbered, Without Fear.

There is Gospel underpinning all this. Classic Black hard style Gospel of the Blind Boys of Alabama. Emotional speaking in tongues of the White Pentecostal church shows. Elvis Presley was an emo Folkie.

We all play Folk music, son. Said Thelonious Monk to Bob Dylan, when the young guy was just starting in New York City and met the Jazz Be-Bop legend.

Better Days may instantly remind me of the Boss. But this is Kennedy’s song, and it conflates love and war. They are curiously linked.

For seven years running/ You’ve been a soldier/ But better days are comin’. I hear We’ll be dancing in the sun as dancing in the Somme. That links it in emotion to Taylor Swift’s The Great War, off her recent Midnights album.

Dermot Kennedy closes his show with Something to Someone. Which he turns into an epic and keeps the enraptured crowd singing the mantra.

Rev. Orange Peel

Leonie Moreland