Music Review: Moving Hearts, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall

Jan 28 2008 by Lew Baxter, Liverpool Daily Post

WHEN the fabled Moving Hearts outfit reformed last year, albeit with only some of its original 1980s line-up, the reception in Dublin was so ecstatic that it persua-ded original founders such as Donal Lunny and Davy Spillane to try a couple of UK gigs.

Thus, after an equally rapturous welcome at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections, the band arrived in Liverpool – its only show in England apart from London’s Festival Hall.

Their unlikely – and astonishing – fusion of electric guitar and bodhran with bouzouki and synthesiser, uilleann pipes, alto sax, bass guitar and drums delivers a wall of sound taking in traditional music, jazz, rock and funk that beggars belief.

Unlike the early days, there is no vocal input, but Donal Lunny, piper Davy Spillane, saxophonist Keith Donald and percussionist Noel Eccles join forces with Eoghan O'Neill, Liam Bradley, Anto Drennan and Graham Henderson to offer a driving instrumental performance largely culled from their highly regarded set piece, The Storm.

They were joined on occasions by Mairtin O’Connor, the accomplished Galway button accordion player, who, as Lunny remarked, seems to have seven fingers on his right hand as he and the rest of the band played a sequence of traditional tunes at a ferocious pace.

It is, though, piper Davy Spillane who seems to spiritually weld the sound together as he sparred with saxophonist Keith Donald to create a magical mood.

Older fans can be reassured that the band’s rendition of material from The Storm, including the longish work titled The Lark, and Spillane’s haunting composition Finore – as well as A Place Amongst the Stones – through to Donal Lunny’s own moving Tribute to Peadar O’Donnell are just as powerful as the earlier incarnation.

The glorious, crystal-clear bilingual vocals of support singer Alyth McCormack, from the Isle of Lewis, either in English or her native Gallic, were a fitting introduction to what turned into a truly memorable show.