Brendan Keeley, The Moat Theatre

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Gwen Langford

Friday 21st August, The Moat Theatre was the venue for the much anticipated Brendan Keeley gig.  Having arrived nice and early and I even dared to enjoy a glass of wine while I awaited the call for the auditorium to open. Having never been in this venue before I was very interested to see what it looked like inside. Soon enough the call came  I entered the most intimate venue I’ve ever being in. Hearing the sound of Bruce Springsteen’s The River, Hungary Heart and Atlantic City playing in the background was very pleasing on my Springsteen friendly ears.

A few minutes later at 8.20 we were introduced to Sam Keeley, Brendan’s 18 year old son who treated us to some top tunes. I was really impressed with the maturity of his singing and guitar playing as well as some excellent song writing! A song of note was Paris Lights which he wrote after being in Paris for his 18th birthday. While his set mainly consisted of original music he also done excellent renditions of Andreas Johnson Glorious and The Kings of Leon Sex on Fire. After playing for approximately half an hour he thanked the audience and said he hoped we would enjoy his father’s show.

After the interval Keeley’s band took their places on stage to cheers from an enthusiastic audience. We could hear Brendan singing a few bars from I’ll Always be Lonely but we could not see him. Suddenly he appeared from the back of the auditorium and joined his band on stage to where they opened with I Can’t Believe It! (We couldn’t believe that this gig had finally arrived after months of waiting, especially after having tickets to a cancelled show in February of this year!)

Brendan than thanked his son Sam for opening the gig and proceeded to sing a song he wrote about him as a child called Eyes of a Child. Brendan introduced Lady in the Painting by telling us the story of how his father was a second hand furniture sales man and that they had many second hand items at home including a painting which Brendan said had eyes that seemed to follow him around the room. Other songs from the first half included Wishing and After the Love.

Perhaps the best story of the night belonged to Three o’clock Train. Keeley spoke about how he used to get the 12.35 train to Dublin for meetings and he would see this man trying to woo a woman to no avail and he would hold an umbrella for her whenever it rained. They eventually got together and the last he heard they had gotten married. Obviously the train times were different as Brendan explained 12.35 was a hard time to fit in a song. He promised us though that every other part of the story was true.

Just before the interval we discovered that Does He Really Love You was Brendan’s highest chart entry before the first of two heart wrenching tributes. This Woman was written for friend who at the age of 33 in a car crash leaving behind four young children. Her husband asked Brendan if he could write a song for her.

While Brendan left stage for a few minutes the band treated us to a rendition of Van Morrison’s  Moondance. After this Brendan came back on stage and all the band members left the stage except for the keyboard player, Paul Skelton. They treated us to a song called You Sleep with Angels. This is from a fortcoming musical that Brendan is writing. On first listen this came across as a beautiful song amd I look forward to hearing more new songs and of course attending the musical when it is released.

After this song Brendan started talking about when he was playing in bars when he was starting out. He described how difficult it was singing his heart out all evening and getting no attention until he announced the last song and then would get shouts for more. He told us how he would change his voice to catch people’s attention and then he treated us to a couple of examples including a very funny and convincing Christy Moore impression. One of the gig highlights was when he was used his guitar as a drum while he sang Simon & Garfunkel’s Cecelia. During the song he was joined back on stage by the rest of the band.

At numerous stages during the gig people thought Brendan was about to sing I’ll Always be Lonely, but he actually waited until the encore and it was definitely worth the wait sounding as good now as it did when it was first released in 1995. With the audience in excellent form Brendan ended the gig with repeating the brilliant Take the Chains for which his daughter joined him on stage. It was a very special moment for everybody enjoying the gig.

Filed under: featured, live

Tags: Brendan Keeley, Bruce Springsteen, The Moat Theatre