Celtic Rock - Black 47 & Raglan Road
Concert Review

dateline: 08/19/00

My friend, WWUH DJ Ed McKeon had an extra ticket to see these two bands at a local Irish bar. Raglan Road hails from New York City these days. They're a rough and tumble lot, a real bad-boy bar band. They and their fans reminded me of the good-time feel the Five Chinese Brothers used to generate, which made the quality of their songs surprise you. Dominic Cromie writes solid songs and Matt Mancuso is the best fiddler I've seen anywhere. Even more frightening, he played trumpet almost equally well - with either hand, rightside up or upside down. Mancuso is half Irish, half Italian, but the Italian side clearly dominates, so he takes a lot of ribbing for it. Toward the end of the last song of the set, he climbed atop the bass drum, still fiddling like the devil, and with the last notes, Cromie unslung his guitar and battered the rest of the drum kit with it. I was just as happy, the thing sounded cheap anyway.

Check out their site to listen to high quality tracks from their "Live" CD - especially "Psycho Reels," which features Mancuso's fire.
http://www.raglanroad.com/f1cd.html

Also, the guys agreed to let me include "Ghost In My Home," the lead-off song from their CD, in the next issue of Fenario. It's available now for free listening and downloading.

Between sets I joined Raglan Road in a shot of Jaegermeister - some kind of dark purple whiskey/schnapps poison that tastes like cough medicine that's ten years beyond it's expiration date. This at least explained why the band - which had been ordering numerous sets of stacked glasses of this stuff - played so maniacally. I then had the good fortune to run into a group of their fans. A quartet of Irishmen imported to play "football" in New Haven. Like many others at the Half Door, they'd come to see Raglan Road rather than Black 47, and this crew insisted that back in Ireland, the boys are worshipped whereas Black 47 is virtually ignored.

Black 47 is a Celtic rock-rap-reggae punk band - if that makes sense. It may not make sense; no matter, that's what they are. With his wire-rim glasses, lead singer Larry Kirwan, looks exactly like W.B. Yeats, and he writes extremely good songs. Anyone who has the chutzpah to rewrite "Danny Boy" as a Celtic rap tale of coming to America to live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan rates pretty high with me.

The night was marred only by an injury on the dance floor when a beautiful barefooted step dancer suddenly realized her feet had been badly cut by stray shards of beer glasses on the floor. The music, however went on.

If you're not dead yet, you should consider passing up the old coffeehouse some weekend and hit an Irish Pub that books this kind of high energy, world class Celtic rock music. Bring earplugs and stick to the Guinness. I haven't had this much fun in years.

Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com