Earlier this year, or possibly late last year, Ted encountered a singer called Imelda May on the Late Late Show. She’s got a great image–a 50’s burlesque kind of look–and did a couple of terrific rockabilly numbers. We promptly went forth to try to find her album.
So, it appeared, did everyone else in Ireland, because we ended up having to order it from Amazon, being utterly unable to locate it in any stores here. The album, “Love Tattoo”, is pretty fantastic, and we spent most of the past year managing to just miss her in concert. This summer we saw she was performing at the Sligo Live Music Festival, so we got tickets, and yesterday we popped up to Sligo to watch her.
It was a very good concert, with somewhere in the range of 750-1000 attendees, I’d say. I’d have probably rated it as terrific if we’d remembered the ear plugs, but we didn’t, and I was about seven feet from one of the sound system speakers, so I spent the entire evening with a finger in my ear in order to reduce the pain of consonants and the trumpet. They played for an hour and a half, with a bunch of songs off “Love Tattoo”, a bunch of songs from the new album which we didn’t get because we didn’t have enough cash on us, and several songs which must be from an upcoming album, as they were introduced as new. A good solid concert all around, and if you like rockabilly/bluesy/torch kind of music, you’d probably like Imelda May.
From a costuming point of view, I very much admired her costume last night. She had an absolutely *fantastic* fitted tiny-leopard-print dress that may or may not have been vintage. It was just below the knee length with a kick pleat and zipped up the back to just above the bra line, and was open with–not lapels because they were on the back, but lapel-like-things–which were lined in red, so it was a good splash of color. And her every accessory (belt, lipstick, bracelet, shoes–which were 4 inch stilettos with ankle straps and a ruffley thing down the otherwise open front) matched that red very well, which I approved of. The only thing I thought she could’ve taken more care with was her hair, which, aside from her trademark bleached swirly Rogue-like-but-not-very stripe, was just pulled back in a ponytail. I thought she should have hot-rollered the ponytail so it was big and fat and sleek.
Also let it be known–and this is not something I typically notice, being (apparently) more of a breast woman myself–she has a *terrific* hiney. Lovely legs, too, but a *very* nice posterior. :)
The rest of her band was suitably dressed too, with the two guys who had hair worth mentioning wearing it in kinda 50s pompadour-slick styles, and their costuming being appropriately rockabilly. I was very pleased with the whole group, visually.
The opening act, a kid named Oisin, was also good. Oisin is *extremely* cute in a sort of young David Tennant/Paul-Bettany-if-Bettany-were-cuter way, and has a quite nice voice, and handled singing in front of 500 people very well. He did one cover (of a song apparently called “Iris”, although I’d have said it was “I just want you to know who I am” if asked) that I thought was perfectly terrible; Ted disagreed and thought he’d done a good job of making the song his own. I thought he’d made it his own, all right. :) Other than that, though, I thought he did really well, and his own compositions were good. One made me think that with a little more oomph it would sound exactly like either the opening song to a musical in which a young man is setting forth to discover his destiny, or the final song in the same musical where life has crushed him down but he’s still harboring a flicker of hope. Possibly it could be both. :)
The music festival itself, sadly, lost points on a couple-three fronts. One, the concert was moved from in town at a nightclub to out of town at a reception room in the Radisson hotel. Apparently there’d been some kind of fire safety issues, and too many tickets had been sold for the original venue. That’s okay, but there wasn’t any visible notification at the original venue saying “Imelda’s been moved!” However, they were running a shuttle bus, and we caught it without a hassle, so that was all right.
What really annoyed us was that while Oisin started virtually on time, when he was finished the Sligo Live manager guy came on stage and said Imelda wouldn’t be on until a quarter to ten, because a lot of people were at the match (there was some big game in Sligo last night too) and they were going to wait for those people to have a chance to get there. I felt, personally, that those people had made their choice to go to the match, and could go fuck themselves as far as attending the concert was concerned. And then the shuttle bus going back was supposed to be picking people up at the event entrance, at the back of the hotel, but instead was collecting people at the front. So we weren’t particularly impressed with either of those things, but overall it was a good evening with a couple of really good performances, and we had fun. :)