Reviews
Pugwash - Jollity
Hot Press - 19th October '05
John Walshe
IA value-for-money double bill is all-too-rare these days, so when you have Ireland's most acerbic songwriter (Dave Couse) twinned with its best exponent of power pop (Pugwash) you'd be something of a village idiot to stay at home. Pugwash is something of a slimmed down affair tonight, with just main singer and songwriter Thomas Walsh strumming guitar, playing songs from his two previous albums, Almond Tea and Almanac, and previewing tracks from his new record, Jollity.
Even without the propulsion and power surge of a band, Walsh's songs have an identity all their own. The template is still very much mid-late Beatles, but Walsh smartly lashes down the influences with a flurry of ropes and knots, his own voice cutting through the 'where-did-I-hear-that-melody-from?' tunes and forcefully tying up his material with a resonance many other bands would murder for.
You would think that a support act would be utilised as merely a foil for the nominal headliner, but Walsh proved otherwise with a deft display of very good songs and extremely funny between-song-banter.
Dave Couse and The Impossible, then, had a tough act to follow, but Couse has had more experience in the limelight than Walsh, and has far more of a serrated edge to his music. Even now, 20 years after A House started and almost 10 years after they finished, Couse remains a dogged, determined, often dramatic figure.
His set contains selections from the past 20 years - A House favourites such as Kick Me Again, Jesus, Why Me?, Endless Art (a new version); solo items such as Celebrity, and cover versions such as John Cale's I Keep a Close Watch.
Watching Couse, centre-stages, arms aloft, ranting and railing against life's inequities, still fusing the personal with the emotional, one receives an uncommon glimpse of someone that has refused to trade artistic integrity for commercial acceptance. Couse's new album, from which he performs several tracks, is called The World Should Know - and it should, of course, except that the cynically fatalistic Couse probably couldn't give a damn if it does or not.
