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In the sleeve notes to A Terrible Beauty, Christy Moore‘s latest album, Christy recalls Mike Harding giving him his first Folk Club gig in 1966—two years after Bob Dylan released one of the most iconic protest albums of the sixties, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. Fifty-eight years later, Christy is still making songs of protest, although his music is, of course, about much more than protest; you’d be pushed to find a more tenderly sung love song than Christy singing Ewan MacColl’s Sweet Thames Flow Softly with Sinead O’Connor and Neill MacColl or a better interpretation of a traditional song than his singing Little Musgrave on the last Planxty reformation Live album in 2004. Not only has Christy Moore never stopped singing those love songs, traditional songs, and songs seen through the eyes of people whose lives have been adversely affected by those wrongs of the world, but A Terrible Beauty, his first album for the revitalised Claddagh label, is at least as good as anything he’s done before. The album’s title comes from the striking Martin Gale painting on the album’s cover.
“Lift up your heart, lean on your dad. When you’re not strong enough, he’ll carry you home,” Christy sings on the Boy In The Wild, the touching opening song. Like so many of the best songs, Wally Page keeps it simple in a lyric that encourages a young person who is encountering life’s challenges to make use of their father’s prior experience – “He’s been there before, he knows the score.” It has some similarities with Ewan McColl’s lovely The Father’s Song. The gentleness of Christy’s vocal, aided by both hushed piano and organ played by Gavin Murphy and Andy Moore’s backing vocals, takes you to the heart of something often left unsaid in father and son relationships.
Last December, I went to the launch of Mike Harding’s book of poetry, The Lonely Zoroastrian, at Manchester’s wonderful Portico Library. The occasion appropriately combined Mike’s love of music and poetry, as his warm, often typically humorous recitation of some of the poems was preceded by him and other musicians that play at a weekly City Centre session of Irish traditional music, warming the audience up with plenty of fine tunes. Christy, following that first Folk Club gig in 1966, has stayed good friends with Mike, and when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Christy was involved in organising a benefit concert, Mike sent him a short poem called Sunflowers, a different, longer version of which is the first poem in Mike’s book. A sombre piano sits under Christy’s sober recitation of the poem, which refers to the resilience of ordinary people in the face of military might and uses sunflowers as a symbol of hope and renewal: “She offered them a handful of Sunflower seeds. Keep them in your pockets boys, that Flowers may blossom from your graves.”
Hunting and gathering great songs is unquestionably one of Christy Moore’s great skills. Amongst the gems he covers here are two songs, Black and Amber and Lemon Sevens, written by Brian Brannigan of the Dublin band a lazarus soul, both recorded on their 2019 album The D They Put Between The R & L. Black and Amber is a song about the destructive effects of alcohol, “Says it all”, Christy wrote on his website, “dysfunction, family abuse, alcoholism, selfishness, cruelty.” Christy sings it a cappella, with Andy Moore joining the chorus, brilliantly sharpening the focus on the raw, hard-hitting lyric. It is a personally significant song for Christy: “This song brings me back to a time in life when the pub was a central part of my life. It remained that way for many years.” The struggle for people who find themselves down and out on the streets is told in Lemon Sevens, which includes the heartbreaking line, “But love won’t stop the winter when you’re on the bottom rung”. Calm support from Seamie O’Dowd’s bouzouki and guitar and Jim Higgins’s bodhrán perfectly carry Christy’s empathetic vocals.
Broomielaw is the album’s single traditional song, again backed by Seamie on guitar, Jim on bodhrán and snare drum, with additional light and shade from accordion played by Seán Óg Graham. Far from being a song Christy has come across recently, astonishingly, he heard it sung by the late Mick Maloney in a bedsit in Dublin 60 years ago (Mick was then in a band with Donal Lunny, subsequently in The Johnstons with Paul Brady, and emigrated to the U.S in 1973, becoming an authority on the history of Irish music in America). The song has a common theme of a sailor returning home, not being recognised by the woman he loves, and in this case, discovering that after waiting for him for seven years, she’s willing to wait for seven more years – not that she needs to, as they marry and go on to run a pub.
In 2022, the Irish women’s football team celebrated qualifying for the World Cup by singing the song Celtic Symphony, written by The Wolfe Tones in 1987 to celebrate the centenary of Celtic Football Club, which includes “Ooh, ah, up the Ra”, allegedly a pro-IRA line. They were forced to apologise and were fined €20,000 by UEFA; the Irish public responded by sending the song to the top of the iTunes chart. Singer and songwriter Mick Blake wrote a song in response to the (English) Sky TV anchor person’s suggestion that the Team might need to be educated about Irish history highlighting the hypocrisy of ignoring the history of the crimes of British colonialism in Ireland and across the world – he titled Ooh Ah, Up the Raj. Christy has covered a number of Mick’s songs, and Mick was happy for him to write a slightly expanded version of the song, titled Cumann na Mná – which can be read as describing the power of the collective of the women footballers – and which, prefaced by Ooh Ah, became the chorus. Sung with only his guitar for accompaniment, the song is disarmingly part sung, part spoken by Christy, where he sounds almost incredulous about the story he is recounting.
Two songs pay tribute to people whose lives were tragically and entirely avoidably cut short. Christy respectfully speaks the words of Life and Soul, bookended by him lilting a tune with wistful piano for company. It’s about Anne Lovett, who was a 15-year-old schoolgirl from County Longford who died, along with her baby, giving birth beside a religious grotto in 1984. Her death led to a debate in Ireland about the role of the Catholic Church in relation to single women and pregnancy. The poignant words Christy recites about who Anne really was were spoken by a man who knew her at a commemoration event in 2014. Lyra McKee was a fearless journalist in the North of Ireland who was fatally shot whilst reporting on riots in Derry in 2019 – “In the right place at the wrong time”, as James Cramer’s song in her memory appositely puts it. Christy’s version, recorded at The Forum Theatre Derry in 2023 with Gavin Murphy playing piano, organ, and bass, has a Moving Hearts era feel to it.
Another fundraiser, this time for Médecins Sans Frontiers in Gaza, brought another song, Palestine, written by Jim Page, who wrote Hiroshima Nagasaki Russian Roulette, which Christy sang with Moving Hearts and Clock Winds Down from Christy’s last album Flying into Mystery. Christy’s light, bouncy strummed guitar belies the barbarism and its causes that Jim’s song doesn’t flinch from spelling out – “Pictures of Children etched in my mind, Buried in the rubble on the firing line”. Christy said the benefit concert happened “when I first heard of the acronym WCNSF (Wounded Child No Surviving Family). The same day 3 MSF doctors died in an Israeli Air Attack on a hospital in Gaza.” Singing, “Talk about settlers from far away. Talk about dollars from the USA”, the song typifies Christy’s consistent willingness to highlight injustices and atrocities, regardless of who is committing them, or who might not like him singing about them.
Fortunately for us, Christy Moore’s songs, albums, and gigs keep coming; on ‘A Terrible Beauty’, the tenderness, empathy, solidarity, and absence of pretension never waver – long may it continue.
A Terrible Beauty (1st November 2024) Claddagh Records
