Reviews

DAVIN O'DWYERreviews Starsailor at the Academy in Dublin and PETER CRAWLEYreviews Handel's Crossing at the Jeanie Johnson, Dublin

Starsailor

Academy, Dublin

It’s destined to be a brain-teasing pub quiz question: Who was the last band to work with Phil Spector? The improbable answer is Wigan’s Starsailor, who back in 2002 hired Spector to produce their second album, Silence is Easy. As these unlikely marriages are wont to do, things didn’t go well – Starsailor were forced to fire him, and he blamed the band for ruining his reputation.

Spector, of course, recently went from legendary to notorious with the strike of a judge’s gavel, so being fired by Starsailor isn’t the worst thing to besmirch his CV. Lead singer James Walsh explained last week that “Spector’s vision for our music had gone and he didn’t know where to lead us”, but listening to this concert, you have to have a smidgen of sympathy for the convicted murderer, at least in the musical vision stakes.

Truth be told, Starsailor are an unremittingly bland act, with a few decent tunes built up over their nearly decade-long career.

On the whole, though, their songs are rigidly formulaic, with unadventurous hooks, predictable verse-chorus-verse structures and frequently mawkish lyrics. They might style themselves a rock band, but they are closer in content to James Blunt or James Morrison – conventional balladeers rather than indie rebels. No Wall of Sound can get over that handicap.

There was a respectable crowd at the Academy to hear them ply their wares, the last concert of this tour. While some of their most ardent fans loudly voiced their loyalty, Walsh and his three bandmates struggled to fully engage with the crowd. Part of the problem is Walsh himself, who comes across as a pleasant guy but is somewhat lacking in the charisma stakes – a real problem given the utter anonymity of his bandmates.

They did manage to rouse the audience with their final few songs and their encore, a largely solo acoustic affair by Walsh, finally made that connection which had up to then been lacking. Closing with Four to the Floor, easily their finest moment, allowed the show to close on an enjoyable high, but it couldn't disguise a lacklustre performance. DAVIN O'DWYER

Handel’s Crossing

The Jeanie Johnston, Dublin

“What’s it about?” the composer’s bootman asks of the work they are sailing to Dublin to see. Sadly, his master’s mistress is sworn to secrecy: even in 1742, the music industry is clearly susceptible to piracy. This she will allow: “A man of low birth who learned that love contains great pain and that’s what made him a man.”

Peter Le Blond, in a pitch- perfect performance from Aaron Monaghan, doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s not about me, is it?”

Actually, Peter, it’s about a still more revered entity, whose life, death and resurrection we celebrate at around this time every year.

It is the story of George Frederic Handel. Once adored, now deeply contentious, his miraculous ways are behind him, his followers have forsaken him and he has been recently crucified by the press.

“The crowd was so thin,” notes Peter, darkly, “and the notices so discommending.” Yet even in his passions, Handel may have one last trick up his sleeve.

Some will recognise a wisp of similarity between Joseph O’Connor’s portrait of the composer and that of the protagonist of Handel’s Messiah.

However overstated, there’s still some satisfaction in such symmetry, further soothed by a composer who never had much time for counterpoint.

That’s not quite the experience of Fishamble’s production, though, performed in the hull of the replica famine ship, the Jeanie Johnston, to which you are pleasantly delivered by Liffey ferry.

Though Jim Culleton’s production goes to great technical lengths to transform O’Connor’s radio play – first broadcast on Lyric in 2003 – into a site-specific performance, the text is entirely unaltered allowing the site specifics to get the better of it.

Only devout pedants will mutter over the anachronisms, but it’s the salad of signifiers that becomes distracting: a 19th- century coffin ship is a perfectly appropriate place for a dramatisation of O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, but it doesn’t chime with the piece’s cosy sense of Empire or Handel’s much-discussed corpulence.

Forming their own baroque oratorio, O’Connor’s words are beautiful, lyrical and designed to be heard but not seen. A radio- friendly duologue between Le Blond and Irish chambermaid Margerie Powers (Kathy Rose O’Brien), who worship or slander their master respectively like the thieves on Calvary, it gives Margerie the most profane music of the piece: “His hoor is with him,” the Galway girl announces, “twiddling on his organ”.

O’Brien recognises the tone of the piece perfectly, but not the place, and gives a performance better suited to a less intimate setting.

Monaghan, moved to more awed cadences, underplays with wonderful effect, but while the character’s spelled-out allusions work fine on the airwaves they don’t work on these waves.

By the time Handel (Alan Stanford) arrives, implausibly done up to the nines (it’s dawn, he’s deeply depressed, on a boat and, according to Margerie, no paragon of tidiness), the effort seems to lose focus. It’s a shame because the music in the text doesn’t warrant discommending notice, but the rest, sadly, is noise.

Runs until 19th April as part of the Dublin Handel Festival. Audiences meet at Bachelor's Walk boardwalk at the Liffey River Cruises dock. PETER CRAWLEY