Christy Moore
Flying Into Mystery
Legendary Irish veteran still hitting the mark
As someone who has always road-tested his material before recording it, Moore faced a new challenge during lockdown: for the first time in a career lasting 50 years he was forced to make a studio album without having first developed the songs in front of an audience. He’s responded bravely with a mature set of exquisitely crafted ballads, his simple guitar picking burnished with elegant piano-and-strings arrangements. From his stirring climate change protest on ‘Clock Winds Down’ (“The ice caps melt, the Amazon burns, the grid goes down) to his deathless take on Dylan’s ‘I Pity the poor Immigrant’, the results are both masterful and moving.
Nigel Williamson