These are fine times for Lisa Hannigan. Her third and current album, At Swim, was her first to breach the British Top 30 and without sacrificing her enigmatic status, propelling Damien Rice’s former muse into the mainstream.
Not everything went her way last night. In quieter moments, she found herself competing against not one but two bars towards the back of the hall. Bottles crashed, ice was loudly shovelled and in one surreal moment, a squeaky-wheeled skipload of clattering empties was hauled through the crowd as Hannigan tried to introduce her band.
Lesser souls would have thrown a tantrum, but Hannigan embraced the bigger picture and turned potential disaster into assured triumph. The 35-year-old from small-town Ireland kept smiling, kept droll (“this song includes the word ‘Christmas’,” she admitted before Snow. “Can I apologise in advance?”) and rose above the situation by sheer force of good-natured will.
Hannigan stripped down the intricate studio layers of her songs, but kept their mystery and added a more folkish hue, while showcasing her uncanny capacity to set a reverential yet joyful mood. She delivered Seamus Heaney’s Anahorish to an adoring audience including Heaney’s daughter Catherine Ann and she somehow sang and played part of Undertow backwards. In calmer waters, there was beauty and poise to spare. O Sleep was a 21st Century lullaby, Lille was a heartbreaker, and Prayer For The Dying oozed understated menace.
Choruses were in short supply, but this was a celebration of invention and new-found accessibility. She spent most of Pistachio thwacking her maracas against her thigh and turned Knots into such a clapalong hoedown that, much to her own surprise, she was out of breath after it. “Not fit…” she croaked. The music may have been precious, but Hannigan most certainly wasn’t.
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