JOSHUA BURNSIDE LIVE IN THE ULSTER HALL, BELFAST - 5.4.25
07/04/2025
Joshua Burnside is refreshing.
He has a refreshing attitude to his new life as a star. Headlining The Ulster Hall at the end of a UK Tour says “star”. As I enter the iconic Hall he is trying to work out why, the opening act of the night, Áine Gordon’s guitar isn’t coming through the PA. It seems he is actually her band. Supporting himself, Áine jokes.
Áine is one to be watched by the way. Next up is Niamh Regan. I have been watching her since late last year. Standing with just a guitar and a voice. Strong songs with a deftly unique touch.
When our headliner arrives with his full band I am not sure what to expect. Our man writes with a Sufjan Stevens imagination and preciseness. I remember seeing Stevens twice in just a few months. In Calvin College, Grand Rapids he fluttered out angelic late night lullabies and I mean his band literally had wings. Next time in Belfast’s Limelight he’s turned angels into pumping it out cheerleaders.
When the Beatles started experimenting with the songwriting genre they stopped playing live. Not being able to replicate the songs live they stop live gigging. Burnside probably hasn’t that luxury. The songwriter needs the concert to survive.
So Burnside takes his song collages and squeezes them into a more classic live band shape. Don’t think that that dumbs down the creativity. He just pushes it in another direction. No, it's refreshing. With a guitarist, cellist, bass player and drummer the songs take on a refreshing life. I was hearing Neil Young and Paul Simon from a Dubliners’ core. Oh the harmonies!
It all leaves the songs sounding so robust. The new record Time Of Teeth fills the set list with such brilliant songs - Up and Down, The Good Life, Marching Round The Ladies, Sycamore Queen, Nothing Completed alongside older songs like Whiskey Whiskey, Hollllligram (how many ls) and Nothing For Ye. A showcase for craft.
I am taken, as I have been since I heard it, by the convolutedly titled Late Afternoon In The Meadow (1887). The blunt thump of its opening lines, "I saw a man jump off the Clifton Street Bridge/ On to the Westlink" to the architectural conclusion of the West Link's existence, "So you never knew me and I never knew you", dividing us.
The boy has a touch of humour too. The Good Life for the Saturday night hipsters who fill the Hall:
Gonna try and not drink tonight
but the good life makes me… thirsty
“Thirsty” hangs off the end with comedic timing.
Climb The Tower started, he tells us, with him wanting to have a laugh at our accent. He took the words that could be from a Norn Iron T-shirt - tower, flowers, shower but then admitted that it became about place.
Place is vitally important to everything the young man does. Marching Round The Ladies might take us to Paris and Glasgow but it then brings us home for a hilarious but punched out protest to what the Tories have done to us all, whether we are up the Shankill or The Falls.
A dancer with a flower head, a piece of Emily Burnside’s art, shimmers and sways like the tunes. There’s ever something happening. It’s all so gripping and mesmerising. It’s the end of a big tour. It’s the Ulster Hall and it has this feeling that Joshua Burnside owns the place.