 | | Reviews | | |  CHRISTY MOORE
The Box Set 1964-2004
Columbia Sony Music 5148162
The competition to win a copy
of The Box Set 1964-2004 is now closed.
There was a time when it looked like Christy Moore was lost to performance, too beset by personal demons to take to a stage again. Happily, he's back with a vengeance, freshly invigorated by the recent Planxty reunion and fortified, hopefully, by the triumph of this 6-CD set. The result of an intermittent eleven-year trawl through old reel-to-reels, singles, minidiscs and a few fan bootlegs, it's a hugely entertaining bag of 101 deletions, live takes, outtakes, rehearsals, his first ever recording into a pal's tape machine in 1964, and songs taped onto a ghetto blaster in the garden shed on nights when "the Heebies" raged.
It's not so much a collection as a journey through four decades of personal and Irish history. From the lighter-timbred Christy of the '60s with heavily traditional repertoire (Lark In The Morning, Seth Davy, Come By The Hill, staples of the early folk revival) to the songs of conscience and exhortation that followed in profusion, it's all here. Ireland's anti-nuclear demonstrations, the hunger strikes, the tragic results of Catholic repression, the 1986 Stardust Disaster (his recording was banned), all are chronicled with great commitment and passion.
Chosen for their feel, atmosphere and personal significance, the inevitable production shortcomings of some of the tracks - the odd distortion or abrupt fade, the skirl of something else entirely leaking through on a re-used tape - along with the fluffs, asides and string breaks, only add to the sense of privileged eavesdropping on some unique moments in musical history. Among many gems is a 1972 vintage Planxty's Down In The Valley complete with wheezy harmonium and four-part harmony (25 years before O Brother...); the gloriously rowdy Glasgow Barrowlands audience participation on a bootlegged Viva La Quinte Brigada; Christy's voice and guitar and the entranced stillness of a thousand-strong German audience in the nine-minute Hamburg Medley.
Assembled with huge care, this set is a fresh breeze in the often-fuggy world of compilation rehashes. The song notes, in Christy's ebullient language, are essential reading - a namecheck of the many singers who influenced a young Irishman learning his craft in the folk clubs of England and a glimpse into the soul of this great song-carrier, humorist, man of words, activist and national treasure. He's playing Glastonbury, London Fleadh and a few autumn dates here this year - you'd be the richer for getting to one of them.
Mel McClellan - May 2004
See also:
Christy Moore: Live At Vicar Street
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Folk & Acoustic
