Outside, brightly dressed people head to festive functions. Inside the often dimly lit north London venue, the focus is more on death and suffering.
To be clear, no audience members are physically harmed tonight by Lankum’s mantric take on traditional Irish music – although the Dublin foursome’s often confrontational acoustics are part of their considerable appeal. It’s the songs that tell of murders (multiple) and suicides (at least two), of grief and dread. There are mutinies at sea (the traditional The New York Trader). On land, travails are rife, nowhere more so than on Rocky Road to Dublin. Lives blighted by addiction regularly stud the band’s set list, which mixes originals, covers and avant-garde rearrangements of folk songs. This is their biggest ever show to date – a sold-out 3,000 capacity – the culmination of a year that saw the release of Lankum’s fourth and most assured album, False Lankum. That record made them, briefly, favourites for the Mercury prize (which went to Ezra Collective); it has ended 2023 with high rankings in many albums of the year lists.
Folk music has always been gristly with suffering. Featuring several vocalists who each play several instruments, Lankum have made their name retelling these old tales of woe with compassion and no little anger. For the band – named after the traditional song False Lankum, a variant of Child Ballad No 93, in which terrible things happen to a baby – ancient afflictions remain horrifyingly contemporary.
Take The Wild Rover, their mesmeric set opener, drawn from their 2019 album The Livelong Day. Thought to have its origins in the 17th century, the tune has travelled widely as a drinking song; it’s a chant with Celtic away fans. Sung by the hypnotic Radie Peat, with meaty harmonies from the rest of the band, the Lankum version foregrounds the bitter regret at having wasted on drink the riches that could have bought “10 acres”, a roof and warm clothing.
Even sadder is Lankum original The Young People, a song introduced as being “about the frailty of human life”. Sung by guitarist Daragh Lynch, it starts with someone “swinging” (from a rope) and reminds us, with close harmonies and a pileup of instruments, that life is very short. There’s time, too, for expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people tonight. Lynch pointedly asks the guffawing audience how it’s going, us having a new king.
In an effort to foreground how a just and equitable world remains a distant prospect, Lankum also mount an assault on the senses. Where previous folk updaters such as the Pogues amped up the punk derangement inherent in traditional Irish music, and outfits like the Waterboys doubled down on the soulful and cosmic aspects of the Celtic tradition, Lankum have taken repetition, reverberation and incantatory harmonies as their tools.
In their hands, the fiddle (played by Cormac Mac Diarmada) and the uilleann pipes (Ian Lynch, brother of Daragh) are shorn of their cheer and become stentorian and relentless. Peat wrestles harmoniums and accordions, establishing a resonant, aching thrum that turns periodically malevolent. Lankum don’t mind the label “doom folk”; at times, they strongly recall Godspeed You! Black Emperor, another band powered by violins, dread and progressive politics. Tonight, Lankum have drafted in even more firepower, the better to pummel the crowd: John Dermody plays percussion and a truly vast bass drum, Rachel Hynes is on piano, and Fred Wordsworth from the band Caroline plays occasional trumpet.
It’s a magnificent din, from the hypnotic outro to The Wild Rover, through to the almost cheerful climax of the final song, Bear Creek. The preternatural storm at sea on The New York Trader (a tale of a cruel ship’s captain who meets a grim end) is evoked as a wild, three-dimensional anti-shanty. DK Gavan’s The Rocky Road to Dublin has a horror soundtrack section in which grinding hydraulics and bowed instruments feel merciless. A reel of sorts emerges out of the murk, but it feels absurdist, never celebratory. At the end is an interpolation of Sting’s anti-nuclear song of solidarity with the striking miners, We Work the Black Seam, derived from a cover version by the now defunct folk vocal group Swan Arcade.
For light relief, Lankum offer the wonderfully smeary, droning Lullaby, an original, mostly instrumental track culled from the band’s first album, Cold Old Fire (2014). They dedicate it to “the absolute legend” that was Sinéad O’Connor, recalling how the band had the thankless task of following her performance at Shane MacGowan’s 60th birthday gig in 2018.
The whole place erupts when they play a cover of the Pogues’ The Old Main Drag – a tale of coming to London, selling your body in Piccadilly Circus, being beaten by police and wishing your life had gone differently. The men sing it together, accompanied by Peat’s oaky harmonium; shorn of the Pogues’ gallows romanticism, it is solemn, bleak and beautiful.
The standout track of the night, however – and the False Lankum album – remains Go Dig My Grave, which marks the night’s second suicide by hanging. Lankum are a collective, never more powerful than when they join voices, but Peat’s extraordinary instrument seems to contain its own polyphony.
She begins a cappella, telling of a young woman whose lover won’t marry her. As various instruments gradually add to the tension, the woman’s suicide note tells how she “died for love”. But the funereal song mounts into a punishing stomp allied to penetrating mosquito sighs, indicting sexism as well. With indecipherable whispers crackling over the swell of sound, the whole experience feels more like an exorcism. In the year in which both O’Connor and MacGowan have gone, it feels as if the untraditional Irish musical tradition is safe in brave hands.
