Lisa O’Neill brings raw force and a dose of whimsy in her Sydney debut

The City Recital Hall is running a series of concerts called Singular Voices and there are none more singular than that of Irish singer songwriter Lisa O’Neill.

Irish singer songwriter Lisa O'Neill performing at the City Recital Hall. Picture: Jess Gleeson

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The City Recital Hall is running a series of concerts called Singular Voices and there are none more singular than that of Irish singer songwriter Lisa O’Neill, who gave a one-off concert as part of an Australian tour which will culminate in an appearance at WOMADelaide.

It’s a voice that is so distinctive and different that people either love it or hate it. It cuts through to where we keep our emotions with a raw force and sometimes a dose of whimsy. Above all it tells a story.

Her own songs cover a broad canvas – the power and beauty of nature, or how we communicated before we wrote things down, like Indigenous communities still do, or the importance of music and the inadequacy of words to fit the vision of a songwriter.

She draws on her life experience for material, going back to her childhood with the song The Globe to when she saw the world as a map on the wall and a globe in her bedroom, wondering why Ireland was such a small dot on it and whether there was a key to get in and out of it.

But they are not just her own songs that she sings. She taps into the rich panoply of Irish folk ballads, forsaking the microphone to sit on the front of the stage with her shruti box – a small bellows instrument like a harmonium without keys – to deliver a searing version of The Rocks of Bawn, a sad tale about a hapless agricultural labourer ripped off by his boss.

She tells a good yarn as well in her County Cavan accent, and although several of her songs are slow, and often accompanied by the drone of a harmonium, she exudes great energy, swaying as she plays her nylon string guitar and occasionally bending and kicking out her left leg. She even danced off stage between songs and ran up and down the aisles of the auditorium laughing with the audience.

Lisa O'Neill with Brian Leach and Ingrid Lyons in the Singular Voice concert. Picture: Jess Gleeson

Two of her band were there for this gig – Brian Leach on hammer dulcimer and whistle, and violinist Ingrid Lyons – and they combined beautifully for O’Neill’s nod to Andy Irvine of Planxty fame and his arrangement of the traditional ballad As I Roved Out.

One of O’Neill’s most played tracks comes from her latest album All Of This Is Chance. Old Note has the beautiful line “I can’t come to quantify the feeling”, a haunting earworm if ever there was one, and her soaring version of Bob Dylan’s All The Tired Horses, used in Netflix’s hit serial Peaky Blinders, brought her exceptional singing to a wider audience.

Birds, or “birdies” as she calls them, feature prominently in her repertoire. She started the evening on her own with her song Blackbird: “Blackbird, sit on my shoulder and tell me a song, When I cry, do you hear in colour or black and white, bird?”

And introducing Birdy From Another Realm she gave the audience a detailed account of how the cuckoo lays an egg in the nest of the meadow pipit, the hatchling eventually evicting the baby pipits. By contrast the peacock is a stunning bird “and we tap into other worlds” while in its presence, O’Neill sings.

I simply saw a bad egg and I thought I’d take the bad egg out

She introduced us to the true story of Violet Gibson, the disturbed daughter of a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who tried to assassinate Benito Mussolini, grazing his nose with a bullet. The mob nearly lynched her but she was rescued and was not charged but spent nearly 30 years confined in a psychiatric hospital in Northampton, England.

“There are many ways to go mad, I go out to Rome with a rock in my fist and a gun in my bag and I shoot Mussolini in the nose,” the eponymous song goes. “I simply saw a bad egg and I thought I’d take the bad egg out”.

On a lighter note, When Cash Was King was written recently after the two-year hiatus when the pandemic meant she couldn’t tour in England. When she did get there she got paid in cash through selling her albums and she couldn’t but a cup of coffee. “I woke up in a cashless land when Charles was king”, she bemoans. “Cash for Charles, Charles for cash.”

Two great Irish talents died within months of each other last year and O’Neill sang Fairytale of New York at the funeral of Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan. For this gig, however, O’Neill paid a moving tribute to Sinead O’Connor, giving a magnificent performance of her Three Babies and following that up with a cover O’Connor often performed herself, Mahalia Jackson’s Trouble of the World.

In a generous set of 14 songs O’Neill told the audience she would sing two more songs and that would be it. After the visceral All The Tired Horses the evening could only end one way with the gorgeous Goodnight World – surely the loveliest lullaby written in a long time.

And really nothing could follow that.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Sydney Festival: Lisa O’Neill

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN January 19, 2024