CHRISTY Moore shocked many die hard fans at the Point Theatre last night when he launched into a three hour ambient electronic sound work, touching all the dissonant basses between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luke Slater, before climaxing in an ear shattering finale of digital mayhem. As if.
No, what Christy really did was very much what you would expect Christy to do on the first night of yet another stretch of sell out gigs. He dipped into his trusty Hiace van load of tunes and pulled out a sheaf of dependable classics. He dashed off Before the Deluge, trotted hesitantly through The Rose of Tralee, and coughed up Ride On without so much as a backward glance. There is, of course, nothing wrong with staying close to the dependable.
Christy began flicking through his regular melodic catalogue of the minutiae of Irish life, our own Tom Jobim, or own Jacques Brel in full flight. But for once it seemed glaringly obvious that this was a history lesson. The Lisdoonvarna Moore sings about is long gone, Jack Charlton and his team are just a memory, divorce is even legal. Christy - and perhaps more tenaciously - his fans, still hang in there. The crowd mutters the words to Welcome to the Cabaret as the last Druid leads the incantation, though he too misplaces the odd word.
The germ of a new song, about the announcement of the Nobel prize for". . . the British poet Seamus Heaney from Londonderry is tossed in, but it needs careful nurturing before it will grow into one of the singer's delicious roguish travel stories. But nobody came here to be surprised, to be taken aback by jarring innovation, to be rocked by uncertainty. And nobody appeared in the least bit disappointed.
