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UID:434@lewesconclub.com
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20241103T190000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20241103T220000
DTSTAMP:20240601T112727Z
URL:https://www.lewesconclub.com/events/john-francis-flynn/
SUMMARY:John Francis Flynn
DESCRIPTION:Love Thy Neighbour Presents: John Francis Flynn\n\nTickets: www
 .seetickets.com/event/john-francis-flynn/lewes-con-club/3018343\n\nBar fro
 m 2:00pm. Doors 7:00pm. Starts 7:15pm. Standing.\n\nOften\, to imagine Ire
 land is to fantasise about rolling hills\, giants\, saints and snakes. As 
 John Francis Flynn says\, it involves “a fair bit of paddywhackery and I
  hate paddywhackery.” The psyche-celtic album artwork for John’s secon
 d album Look Over The Wall\, See The Sky\, hints at this too though: a c
 rystal goblet of luminous green Crème de Menthe resting upon a mossy ledg
 e\, perfectly encapsulating this imagined idea of Ireland in a way that is
  both funny and poignant. But\, if you have to imagine Ireland in the firs
 t place\, then you’re probably not too familiar with its reality: the to
 wering glass giants of Google and Facebook\, the unaffordable luxury hotel
 s lining the Liffey amidst a homelessness epidemic and the highest rents i
 n Europe.\n\nOn his new single ‘Mole In The Ground’\, a cover of an Am
 erican anti-establishment folk song recorded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in
  1928\, John evokes the rebellious energy he felt in his home of Dublin du
 ring a time when it was being “torn to shreds by property developers and
  vulture funds.” In his rendition\, John allows the surrealism of the so
 ng to take centre stage\, opting to speak rather than sing the words. By t
 aking away its nursery rhyme-like melody\, we focus instead on our narrato
 r’s stranger fantasies and desires. His voice\, too\, sits under the gro
 und of the melody\, tapping into the song’s dark\, hallucinatory spiri
 t: “I don’t like the railroad man/The railroad man will kill you whe
 n he can/ and he’ll drink up your blood like red wine.”\n\nTo listen t
 o this album is to witness history through a modern lens in a trance-like 
 state. As expected\, Flynn’s contemporary influences are sufficiently 
 esoteric\, from ‘The Heart Pumps Kool Aid’ by —__–___ to ‘Th
 e invention of the Human’ by Dylan Henner (a concept album about an AI l
 earning to sing). However\, he was also inspired by his contemporaries in 
 the traditional music scene in Ireland\, many of whom contributed to the a
 lbum\, as well as those outside of it\, such as noise-rockers Gilla Band a
 nd Rising Damp.\n\nTraditional music of course is not one-size-fits-all. E
 ach song has its own story\, history and characters which the singer must 
 serve. “You can’t sing all the songs. Well some people do. But you can
  tell if someone doesn’t connect with that song…” On the record’s 
 closer\, ‘Dirty Old Town’ by Ewan McColl\, John takes a song that’s
  been “done to death”\, strips it back\, slows it down and unexpecte
 dly adds brass\, harking back to the working-class colliers bands of the e
 arly 20th Century. In his reimagining of the song\, rather than intensifyi
 ng it he does the opposite\, offering a calm and grounding resolution to a
 n otherwise otherworldly album.\n\nOn his last record\, I Would Not Live
  Always\, John was much more conscious of bringing acoustic instruments 
 and weird synthesized sounds together as a concept. But now with his uniqu
 e musical language fully formed\, “I feel freer within that language t
 o experiment and take it further without it being too conscious or premedi
 tated”.\n\nInstead\, the songs seem to live somewhere in John’s subcon
 scious\, as he is often able to visualize exactly how they will sound befo
 re putting them down. With ‘Kitty’\, (famously recorded by Shane MacGo
 wan on The Pogues’ debut\, ‘Red Roses For Me\,’) John had already he
 ard a version of this song structured loosely in his head involving a dron
 e\, a warped clarinet\, and a simple Robert Wyatt-esque beat. The result i
 s a two minute lament after which sudden distortion punctures through a wa
 ll of sadness before pulling back completely to just a singular drone. Sim
 ilarly\, with ‘Willy Crotty’ (a track recorded in a bedroom with mem
 bers of The Mechanical Bull McCabe featuring the unlikely combination of a
  clarinet\, a handheld radio\, a Casio SK1\, a harmonica and an effects pe
 dal) we witness how this subversive way of recording can get to the root o
 f a song’s emotion by removing the boundaries and expectations that trad
 itional instruments can sometimes enforce. It is less about the use of d
 rones or synthesizers or clarinets\, “but it’s the treatment of them.
 ”\n\nThese effects become John Francis Flynn’s guttural language\; som
 etimes they are tiny droplets glitching in the background\, other times th
 ey are great droning waves gushing through the songs. For John\, they of
 ten come to represent a descent into intense sadness. Where we might hear 
 horror or feel terror\, John explains that these effects are always aiding
  the emotional leverage of the song\, as for many of our protagonists\, 
 “these are the sounds of their lives are being torn apart.”\n\nThe son
 ic landscape created through the unconventional use of instruments jagged 
 arrangements often teeters on the edge of disharmony\, but it gives the wo
 rk a magnetism by drawing you into its curious orbit of experimental folk.
  John masterfully unpicks traditional songs and rearranges them with an em
 otional force that sometimes leaves them unanchored. They float in a surre
 al space between the past and the present\, the analog and the digital\, b
 etween love and tragedy. Look Over The Wall\, See The Sky is an album 
 concerned with imagination\, but not only with what John calls\, “an ima
 gined Ireland\,” but also the re-imagining of traditional Irish music an
 d the hopeful fantasy of an Ireland that could exist ‘over the wall’: 
 powerful\, hopeful and free.\n\n[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
 nv0ZuqeZylw[/embedyt]
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