Let's play Fantasy Festival. Rock icon Patti Smith sits in a sylvan meadow and strums an acoustic guitar for 100 people, as dusk falls on an Indian summer's day. Aussie Gloom God, Nick Cave, sits in a candlelit room at a grand piano and sings for an audience of 70, siting on the floor around him.
REM's Michael Stipe, arrives unannounced and sings with Patti on a floating stage , aswim in a picture-book lake. To heighten the air of unreality at the Liss Ard Festival in West Cork, these past five days, all it would have taken was for Elvis to show up and give it some karioke.
On Friday night, though, the event opened out somewhat and around 600 fortunate souls were allowed entry to a marquee in the grounds of Lissard's stunning nature reserve. Patti Smith headlined, and given the amount of punkish, screaming, white noise guitar exuberance she and her extremely accomplished band exuded, it could as easily have been some dark and nihilistic basement club in the neon-soaked underworld of 1970s New York New Wave.
I was unfamiliar with most of the material on offer, but the Fender-fuelled fury was enough in itself and she did encore with a viciously poisonous Rock and Roll Nigger. Age has not blunted her vitriol.
Earlier, Nick Cave had flitted between gently melancholic piano-led torch songs and cobweb-bedecked gothic rock stompers. Cave's presence is intense and magnetic: he could sing nursery rhymes and they would sound telling, portentous and heavily-weighted with meaning. He does much more, of course, and highlights here included a number of tracks from his stunning Mur- der Ballads album, and his lovely take on Shane McGowan's beautiful Rainy Night in Soho.
This came across as if it was written just for him and suggested that this is an Australian who still has good, clean, Irish corpuscles raging through his bloodstream.
