There are a lot of things I’ve done at gigs. For instance, due to me having a naturally nervous disposition, there have been a few times when I’ve almost gotten sick from nerves before going on stage. I’ve only played a handful (less than 30 or so over six years), but it’s only gotten a little easier as time’s gone on. Similarly, I’ve also kept to a strict limit of one drink, and one drink only, while at a show – a lot of people simply go to gigs to get tanked, but not me; I can have just as good a time with the minimum amount of alcohol in my system (indeed, as the gig that is the subject of my review proved).
One thing I haven’t done too often is this: I haven’t been left disappointed by a support act in years. Maybe I’m just really lucky, I don’t know. Conversely, neither have I been genuinely blown away by a warm-up act all that often – I can count those occurrences on one hand – but it happened on Saturday. Daithí’s live show has come on quite some distance since the last time I saw him, and his performance as warm-up for We Have Band was nothing short of mesmerising.
The Galway native doesn’t talk all that much, preferring to let his music do the talking, and that’s fine for now because his music inhabits quite a unique space: his two main instruments are a synthesised fiddle and a loop station, and his music blurs the lines between electro, folk and Irish traditional. He first came to the attention of the nation when performing on a talent show here a few years back, and has come a long way since then. There is a significant difference between how many are in the room when he takes the stage and how many are present when he finishes with the breathtaking ‘In Flight’ (a track taken from his debut album, which, we are told, will be out ‘before the end of the year’) – he really knows how to draw a crowd, and with songs the quality of ‘Carraroe’ in his set, it’s not hard to see why.
Neither have there been many times when I’ve been genuinely worried that the support is going to upstage the headliners, but there was a little of that before We Have Band came on, I have to admit. I needn’t have worried, though – WHB were on fire. On the night, they take to the stage around 9:10pm, and again, I must admit something: I didn’t expect the room to be quite as packed as it was by then. Indeed, Thomas WP thanks us later for ‘coming to see us and not Ham Sandwich [a Dublin band who are playing to a sold-out main room two flights above us]’ – you can tell from the opening notes of ‘Steel in the Groove’ that he really appreciates the turnout.
They all do, in fact – all four of them. Wait, four?! Yep. Despite their latest album being called ‘Ternion’, WHB’s live setup consists of four people: Thomas and Dede WP, Darren Bancroft and a drummer who adds one hell of a lotto their sound. ‘Visionary’ sounds considerably beefed up in contrast to its album version; so too do a stunning version of ‘Love, What You Doing?’ (which gets the first big cheer of the night from the crowd) and ‘After All’ from the new record, which, considering it packs a particular percussive punch on ‘Ternion’, sounds even more impressive tonight – again, it’s all down to those drums.
By now, even those at the back are starting to take notice, and then WHB drop a D-bomb on the place: ‘Divisive’ really gets people going, inciting the first big singalong of the night as well as plenty of dancing. This is followed by a brace of intense songs from ‘Ternion’; ‘Watertight’ and ‘Shift’, and in particular the latter, are well-received, proving that the new stuff works quite alongside songs from ‘WHB’. That album’s title track crops up towards the end of the set, and it goes down a storm. People clearly came here for a good time, and that’s exactly what they get.
The set closes on ‘You Came Out’ (what else?) and gets the best reaction of the night, before the band say farewell and disappear off stage; it’s obvious we’re getting an encore, but it begins in humourous fashion as the band find the entrance to the alcove on their left blocked, and return to the stage almost immediately as they ‘had nowhere else to go’. A beautiful stripped-down version of ‘What’s Mine, What’s Yours’ leads into a wonderful rendition of ‘Where Are Your People?’, and then the band bring the curtain down on their performance with ‘Oh!’ from ‘WHB’ – I don’t need to tell you how that goes down.
There are some calls for ‘Honeytrap’ just before the band launch into the show closer – maybe next time, eh? Yes, I said next time, because there are about 300 people, myself included, who definitely want them back, and judging by the turnout on the night, perhaps they themselves will be main room-ing it if they come back here again.
Ternion is available to listen to in its entirety here.
Posted by Gareth O’Malley
