Wallis Bird at The Academy | Review

Wallis Bird at The Academy, Friday 25th April 2014

As a person from the town of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, there are two people you can mention when trying to give your hometown a bit if lustre in the eyes of a stranger. One is Colm Toibín, the adaptation of whose novel ‘Brooklyn’ was recently filmed in the town. The other is Wallis Bird. There was no sign of the man of letters showing support to his fellow Slaney-sider in The Academy on Friday night, but he was hardly missed by Wallis’s faithful.

As a reviewer one of the main things to keep in mind is that you are the one reviewing the gig, and that the audience’s reaction shouldn’t influence your account to any significant degree. It’s clear from fairly early on tonight however that Wallis Bird is not the kind of performer who performs for her audience. Having them sing the opening lines of some songs, getting them to harmonise on others, she turns the venue into one huge musical collective. Unlike most gigs, this audience doesn’t need prompting to clap along, they just know, like they’re part of one big jam band.

The atmosphere is ecstatic, and you can’t help but feel that Wallis is in her element on that stage, as she stomps around and swings her guitar, stepping lightly like Van Morrison’s ballerina over mistakes and technical hiccups, impervious to their influence. It’s a funky aesthetic that informs her sound, a focus on danceability rather than straight out rocking that sweeps contagiously through the venue. In spite of journalistic integrity it’s hard to resist it.

This funky sound keeps the gig consistently entertaining throughout but it doesn’t hit its peak until the last two songs in the main set, like a time-bomb, set to perfection. The disco-influenced Hardly Hardly fulfils the obvious purpose of its creation, which is to get people moving and just as the set approaches the critical point at which things could go to the next level or start to recede again, we get a rendition of Encore, which immediately hits the right note from the very start.

Yes, the otherwise on-the-ball audience definitely missed a beat after that song by not continuing the call of “come back/oh come back” when Wallis leaves the stage, instead going for the established “one more tune”, which has a bit of a monopoly on the encore market these days. Either way, the result is the same and she does indeed come back for an encore. She performs an Ani Difranco cover Little Plastic Castle, a rather heartfelt criticism of junk media and paparazzi culture done in a stripped back arrangement.

It’s unlikely Wallis’s enthusiasm for the lyrics on this song rubbed off on those in attendance who weren’t already familiar with it. Her strength doesn’t so much rest in the words she sings, but the visceral impact of her music, the sense of community that comes with it. She wouldn’t be the same artist if she stood like a young Dylan with an acoustic guitar, spilling out a torrent of words. The ideas are important of course, but the sense of inclusiveness that she communicates in her lyrics and crowd interactions comes through just as clearly in the tones and notes of her music and the way she acts onstage. After one trip into the heart of the community she has built away from home, a second is something to look forward to.