Reviews

Echo & the Bunnymen/Vicar Street, Dublin:  It's a long way away from those post-punk days in the early 1980s, but Liverpool's Echo & the Bunnymen don't seem to have changed that much.

Band members have come and gone, but the core unit of singer Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant remains, supplemented by eager, younger musicians probably only too willing to attach themselves to the Bunnymen trailer.

Call this a nostalgia show if you must (and you'd be right), but when the songs are this good it knocks the negative connotations to one side. In their place is the overall sense of a band at peace with their back catalogue, neither dismissive nor derisory; the first hour alone was full of songs from their glory-days of 1980-84 - Rescue, Crocodiles, The Killing Moon, Seven Seas, Show of Strength, The Back of Love, Bring on the Dancing Horses and more. The remainder of the set peppered more recent material with older album track selections, yet nothing seemed out of place.

All told, it was a display of entertaining and insouciant arrogance: McCulloch's thin, cool presence could be made out amid the dry ice and purple haze of the lights by the orange tip of a cigarette; Sergeant applied the principles of almost scientific studiousness to his superlative guitar playing, while the men in the shadows kept their heads down and played efficient back-up. At the root of the Bunnymen's continued, if rather less high-profile success, are Sergeant's innate melody lines, which insinuate at every turn, and McCulloch's often tender explorations of life, the universe and everything.

Growing older gracefully and with honesty? And the songs still speak to us? It's something we should all aspire to.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Jamie Cullum/ Whelan's, Dublin: Once, if you wanted to rile a pianist, you called them a percussionist. But, as Jamie Cullum abandons his keys and pads around the baby grand to thump out a rich, reverberating groove upon its every surface, such hang-ups have clearly gone out with the Ark, or Harry Connick Jnr. His unlikely mambo becomes more vigorous and whoops erupt from the floor.

These are exciting times for the 24-year-old jazz idol from Wiltshire. Now as famous for his £1 million record deal as his music, he has quickly racked up more television appearances than Trevor McDonald, but it is in live performance that his star really shines.

Beginning with his warm, wistful composition Pointless Nostalgic and leading into the beat-driven It Ain't Necessarily So, Cullum surges free from cocktail jazz and leads his trio to greater percussive feats across a mix of jazz standards and unusual covers. Geoff Gascoyne fraps the side of his double bass between taut solos, Sebastiaan de Krom's drums grow more frenetic and Cullum reaches into the guts of his instrument to tweak each note.

To say that his playing lacks polish is true, but also completely beside the point. The same impish spirit that allows him to knee the keys during I Get a Kick Out of You, or hoodwink Under My Skin with a false ending, leaves his oak-smoked voice parachuting pop lyrics as easily as verses of scat. Although such showmanship feels more party-piece than heedless experimentation, it is shamelessly entertaining. More capricious is his stirring Singin' In the Rain, enclosed between verses of Radiohead's High and Dry.

Led through simple vocal vamps, handclaps and budding affections, the audience becomes another willing instrument in Cullum's array. It is the one he plays best of all.

Paul Lewis

North Down Heritage Centre

Dermot Gault

Mozart - Adagio in B minor. Schumann - Kinderszenen. Schubert - Drei Klavierstücke D946. Six German Dances D820. Schönberg - Six Little Piano Pieces

Op 19. Liszt - Sonata in B minor

Paul Lewis's recital ranged from Mozart's early intimations of the romantic spirit, as expressed in the classical language of his Adagio in B minor, to the last flutterings of the ghost of romanticism in Schönberg's miniatures, culminating in a highpoint of 19th-century piano writing, Liszt's one-movement Sonata in B minor. The implied continuity was underlined by playing the last three works continuously. If the juxtaposition of Schubert and Schönberg didn't quite come off - a longer pause between the works might have helped - there was an eerie aptness about following the last of the Schönberg pieces with the murky opening of the Liszt sonata.

This most demanding of the works on the programme received a performance of assurance and emotional and dynamic range. The young English pianist combined technical command and a grasp of the form of this half-hour single span with the ability to enter into the work's changing moods.

North Down and Ards Heritage Centre in Bangor offers an attractively intimate venue, albeit one with a dryish acoustic. Perhaps for this reason the opening Mozart Adagio seemed slightly detached. Nevertheless this was a true Adagio. The Schumann cycle had unassuming charm, but the real find of the concert was the three little-known Schubert Klavierstücke. This is music which in style, melodic charm and harmonic richness is comparable to the well-known Impromptus but which has been neglected, perhaps - as the programme note suggests - because of the anonymous title under which they were published.

Peter Crawley