Went to see Steve Earle in Vicar Street last night. Missed the start of the show because Juhniallio was polishing off an awkward kebab in Abrakebabra (in fairness it was sloppily constructed and required the use of three forks to disassemble into bitesized convenience pieces).
Anyway stumbled into the venue mid-way through the first or second song I’d say. Escorted to our aisle seats by an usher and sat down to enjoy the gig. A quick glance to my left to take in my neighbours revealed a couple of older lads in their sixties maybe - nice to see a diverse crowd I thought. Then had a look around the whole place and realised everyone was in their sixties except myself and Juhniallio. Weird audience. And somewhat placid.
Gig itself was decent. The age profile of the crowd didn’t help because there was feck all enthusiasm about the whole affair but Earle persevered well and did play some cracking tunes. A couple of decent speech bits as well:
“I’ve been coming to this country for a long time and I’ve lived here for a while and I’ve seen plenty of things change. It’s a great thing that you no longer lose the best and the brightest to emmigration. But some changes just aren’t as great. Sometimes I look around and think, frankly that’s a bit fucking American.”
Highlights were Jerusalem (“Some guy asked me recently to stop singing this song. I’ll stop singing it when the war stops,”)* Tom Ames’ Prayer and a cover of If I Should Fall From Grace With God.
Good gig, good songs, shit audience. 5/10
*Not sure of the punctuation there - the comma would normally be inside the inverted commas but outside the brackets. When you have brackets and inverted commas together I’m not sure which takes precedence but I’ve gone with the inverted commas because they happened first.