This week, with 17 March on the horizon, the thought passed through my mind of celebrating some of the Celtic-punk that my friend and uni roommate loved blasting at all hours.1 But then local media this week has been blanketed with the marketing for Foy Vance’s new album, The Wake, and that started the internal debate about a favourite Foy song – and the winner was the opening track from 2013’s sensational Joy of Nothing, the triumphant Closed Hand, Full of Friends.
The pounding, urgent piano riff throughout is one of my favourite sounds in all music.
I met Foy, briefly, around about 2011; I say, ‘met’ – I nearly took his head off as I span around with a big camera bag over my shoulder, not realising he had just slipped through the stage door behind me. He took it well and we had a quick chat. I was fascinated, some years earlier, when he had popped up (almost uncredited)on the original Organic Hymnal EP released by the mass, Bangor-Elim-adjacent Rend Collective Experiment:2 Vance sings an incredible vocal line on the closing track, Send Me – in fact, although I haven’t been including two videos in-post in this series so far, you should here it.
Foy, the preacher’s son, sang this beautiful, aching track of faith; a faith he openly wrestled with and, by his own account, is tied up on the relationship with his father which dominates his music. From memory, he took the compliment but didn’t want to delve into it too much then and there. His first full album, Hope, was huge – the fact that, when we were undergrads, we could walk across town to see Foy and others in The Rotterdam,3 and his music had ended up being on these big US TV shows, was an inspiration.4
Foy Vance has many, many great songs – at this exact moment, this is my favourite.
- Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys. And if you think you’ve never heard of them, what about this one from the FIFA 2005 soundtrack? Flogging Molly’s 2004 album Within A Mile of Home (Spotify link here) is worthy of your time. ↩︎
- Rend released two EPs before they were signed, and some of the tracks made it onto the first major release. The launch night, in the Black Box, felt like it had as many people on stage as on the floor – I can’t remember when it was, but it was absolute chaos. A band I was in had previously supported Numinous, which original Rend lynchpins Steve and Gareth Gilkinson had been part of, but the styles were… different! ↩︎
- The Rotterdam (RIP) was mad. You had Foy Vance and Ken Haddock on one night; you might have had Duke Special the next. And these people were actual musicians, in this brilliant, tiny, dingy pub in Sailortown. We didn’t know how good we had it. What a loss. ↩︎
- See also: the moment Bell X1’s sumptuous Eve, The Apple of My Eye was on Grey’s Anatomy or whatever. ↩︎