Photo Credit: Michael Williams

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Back in the mid 16th century, the arched entrance to Christchurch Cathedral’s crypt was nicknamed Hell on account of being presided over by a horned figure carved in black oak. This arched entrance area was leased to local entrepreneurs and lined with taverns, mostly frequented by professional folk from the nearby law courts. Above these houses of carousal were lodgings suitable for single men, advertised thus:

“To be let, furnished apartments in hell. N.B. they are well suited to a lawyer.”

Dante Alighieri might’ve approved, given that he consigned solicitors and their ilk to the lowest circles of his Inferno to rub shoulders with murderers, warmongers, suicides, sodomites, blasphemers, perverts, usurers, fraudsters, flatterers, simoniacs, alchemists, fortune tellers, falsifiers, evil impersonators, counterfeiters and false witnesses. That venerable versifier might also have applauded the point in tonight’s set where Josh Ritter delivered a fevered reading of ‘Thin Blue Flame’ off the new album ‘The Animal Years’, with its rolling bolero beats and hallucinogenic couplets half way between Rimbaud and Revelations, and maybe the most tranced out and visionary litany tune since Bob’s ‘Hard Rain’. The holy and austere surroundings only rendered the performance that much more powerful. It was certainly a lightning bolt moment for this listener, who hitherto always found himself torn between liking Mr Ritter and being exasperated at the transparency of his influences (Bruce, Leonard, Nick Drake, Townes Van Sant).

It was, by anyone’s compass, a pretty remarkable night. He started low-key with ‘Idaho’, a coyote call of a song invoking the two JCs, (Johnny and Jesus), before easing into ‘Girl In The War’, a country rock dialogue between Peter and Paul. All credit to the men behind the wires – Christchurch’s vaulted ceiling and cavernous environs could’ve reduced the sound to murk, but in the case of band versus room, the band won on points. It doesn’t hurt that Ritter himself is one of those guys who can take the asterisks out of s****r-s********r. ‘Snow Is Gone’ is of course an anthem by now, a song whose general drift is literally “hello birds/hello sky” yet stays just on the right side of the line that divides nature boy hymn from hippy drivel. Similarly, ‘Kathleen’ is a lovely lilting half sister to ‘So Long Marianne’. So, miracles a go-go: I went in a doubting Thomas and came out Damascus-ised. Mass is ended, go in peace.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.