Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Warm and StrongAuthor(s): Sheila HamiltonSource: Fortnight, No. 304 (Mar., 1992), p. 40Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25553356 .

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The song, the most outstanding in her reper

toire, is performed unaccompanied, in the style of a ballad, with a distinctly Irish flavour. It is an astonishingly mature composition from this

young woman, and in its raw confessional

nature it brings to mind the work of Sinead O'Connor.

But this is a comparison Noella is quick to

dismiss, citing as influences instead such lumi

naries as Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina

Simone and Annie Lennox?artists who re

flect the emphasis she places on the power and

range of the voice.

Noella is now writing and performing full

time, following a brief flirtation with art col

lege. She composes on the guitar and boasts of

having enough material to fill two albums.

Many of these songs are of a similarly revelatory

style to My Shame, and the Derry landscape?

Shipquay Street and Crawford Square, for in

stance?is evoked to mark the time and place of her experiences.

Although aware that many other people will

experience feelings similar to her own, Noella

Hutton is not interested in proselytising. She

values the joys of performance as much as the

opportunities it allows for communication.

Local television exposure has brought her

considerable talents to a wider audience, and

last summer she performed in Dublin and Lon

don. She would be singing six nights a week if

the opportunities came her way, she said, look

ing forward to committing some of her songs to

vinyl in the not too distant future.

In search of greater opportunities to sing, Noella left for London in November, and has

remained there since. In January she performed at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden in London, an

important venue for Irish acts. A recording

contract, however, remains elusive.

Warm and

strong

SHEILA HAMILTON found her mood lifted by a Dolores Keane concert in Belfast

DOLORES KEANE has a warm, strong voice

that can make even the slushiest song tolerable.

In her time with De Dannan she specialised in

19th-century American Irish ballads, skilfully treading the fine line between mawkishness

and deep emotion.

In concert in the Arts Theatre last month,

she performed the same miracle. She managed to sing Galway Bay as if it had never been sung

before. And Dougie McLean's Caledonia was

brilliantly detached from all the memories of the beer advertisement about the homesick Celt

who packs in his job in London and comes home for a decent pint. As Dolores Keane

pointed out, she sang it first.

There was the obligatory Eric Bogle song (every Irish singer seems to have one). This

time it was the anti-war All The Fine Young

Men, which led beautifully into John Faulkner

(Keane's husband) singing an Ulster song from

the Napoleonic wars, The Bonny Light Horse

man. Mouth Music, a fast dazzling adaptation of Hebrideanporr a beul (music sung for danc

ing) led equally well into My Love is in America, a good modern song about emigration.

Her repertoire spanned traditional and con

temporary music, love songs and political songs. It's hard to pick a highlight, but she sang a beautiful version of The Moorlough Shore. The

lowlight was Sonny's Dream, a peculiar song

popularised by Christy Moore. It combines a

pretty, infuriating, memorable tune and a sinis

ter, misogynistic little narrative about a boy who grows up on an isolated farm. He's never

allowed to leave home, and even when his

mother is dead, as an old man "mammy still

haunts his dreams".

For the TV series Bringing It All Back Home last year, Dolores Keane recorded it

with Mary Black and Emmylou Harris, singing in luscious, too-sweet-to-be-wholesome har

mony. The Belfast audience recognised it (it was a single), loved it and didn't seem to get the

creeps at all. Her drummer and guitarist made

credible falsetto stand-ins for Mary Black and

Emmylou Harris.

I emerged into Botanic Avenue in a warm

golden glow (humming Sonny's Dream, to my

great irritation). Half an hour and a couple of

controlled explosions later, the glow was a

pleasant but very distant memory.

Distant voices

Straight to camera?Damian Gorman in Devices of Detachment

DAMIAN GORMAN took a brave step in ignoring the awkward reticence most northern Irish poets feel about speaking directly about the 'troubles' by making his verse documentary, Devices of Detachment, Martin Crawford writes.

The half-hour film, shown at a special preview at Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast last month, takes issue with the ways people in Northern Ireland cope with the

violence?the 'devices of detachment' they have acquired that enable them to "take the scenic route around the corpses".

Reticence, and thus detachment, is central to the film's message?the famous

reticence of the people of the region and the everyday sidestepping around the politics that engender the violence, which all its citizens take part in. Everyday life manages to ignore the 'troubles', at least to the extent that they do not impinge on

workaday lives. They are kept at a safe distance, without even a consciousness of

this complicity in the conspiracy of silence. Devices seeks to ignore the usual cinematic cliches so typical of films about the

'troubles'. There are no shots of murals in west Belfast, for example?a deliberate

strategy according to the director, Hugh Thompson. What we have instead is an

interesting collage of images, and a finely written (mainly verse) script, which takes us on Gorman's personal odyssey where he confronts his own evasions, the subtle

ways he himself has developed to detach himself from the situation. Combining verse with film can be a risky scenario aesthetically. There is a danger

that the film can simply follow the verse?a mundane transfer of words into image. Here, though, the image works deftly off the words, elaborating, expanding meaning, imaginatively pursuing the script's argument in a forceful and persuasive manner.

Cliches are ignored too in the minimal use of interview in the film. One interview is with Peter Montelier, a former local newspaper editor. Gorman puts it to him that newspaper reports do not tell the story at all, do not scratch beneath the surface of the statistics. The dead taximan or soldier?what was their real story? Where did they get their human-ness from? Another short interview is with a mortuary technician? Gorman asks him how he goes about putting dismembered bodies back together after an explosion. It's a powerful piece of film and it needs no gloss.

Damian Gorman certainly raises a lot of questions. It would be unfair to demand of him an answer, though one is left wondering and slightly disturbed. After seeing this film it is that bit more difficult to find one's own devices of detachment.

Devices of Detachment will be shown on BBC2 in the coming months

40 MARCH FORTNIGHT

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