By Monk
Regular Über Rock readers (and if you’re not one, where have you been hiding?) will know the absolutely HUGE level of admiration, love and respect I have for the genius who goes by the name of Pat McManus, a man whose career I have followed for my entire adult lifetime and a musician who just leaves me in awe every time I am in his presence. There is a reason why he is called ‘The Professor’: he is a master of his craft, and that is melding blues, folk and rock music in the most sublime of manners, in a way which is not only unique to his own Irish heritage but also a man who spends much of his time passing his craft on to younger musicians (I can’t count the amount of world champion violinists he has coached).
Regular readers will also know full well my views on live albums. I generally don’t like them. They go from one extreme to the other, in several regards. They’re either over-produced, and reproduced, with multiple overdubs to make up for the artists’ onstage failings; or they’re under-produced and amateurish under-representations of the talent on show. Which is why I approached this third live album from my old mucker with a degree of scepticism… something I will come back to at the end of this critique.
This album is something of an homage for Pat, as he always had a love of France. The French audiences embraced him from the beginning of his career in Mama’s Boys to that of his solo career, and this album is very much a “thank you” to all those Patophiles who have stood by him over the past four decades, and particularly promoter Marco Le Rolle, at whose Tribal Roch event in the hills above the Cote d’Azur this set was recorded.
As you would expect, therefore, it’s rammed with Pat’s signature sounds, from the rowdy opening of ‘Blacklisted’ to his trademark violin crescendo on ‘Runaway Dreams’, the ever declarative ‘Straight Forward’, his distinctive and highly personal take on ‘Parisienne Days’ (how long does he hold that note for?) into the affectionate ‘Belfast Boy’ to the ever vibrant ‘Needle In The Groove’. OK. there’s a few keynote songs missing, such as one of my personal faves, ‘Return Of The G Man’, but it was a festival set so we can’t have everything, can we?
Now, back to that scepticism… ‘Live In France’ only goes part way towards capturing the pure, unbridled energy of a PMB show. Pat is an artist who has to be seen in his natural environment, and that is on stage. Nothing beats watching his fingers fly over the fretboard with an unnatural ease, the notes cascading from every subtle motion, the melodies flowing effortlessly but somehow seeming to leave both the performer and the awestruck onlooker drenched in sweat.
Having said that, despite its protraction – Pat has been known to play for three-plus hours with narry a pause for breath on the part of either himself or his audience – this is another example of an artist in his prime, a performer who instills confidence in his ability not only to meet but often exceed expectations with each and every performance, a musician who lives for the music he plays and a craftsman who has many of his contemporaries waking up, smelling the oil on his machine heads and saying to themselves “fuck it, I’m going back to bed…”
- ‘Live In France’ is released on 21 July.
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