Sombre moments meet storming gigs in Christy Moore’s Flying Into Mystery

Christy Moore thrives on audiences: the way they respond to stories, the fast, funny songs, the slower, deeper ones, and the disjunctures between the two. So Ireland’s lockdowns must have been a form of torture. He used the time to conceive and then record this new album, his first studio session since 2016. It is a familiar mix of traditional songs, some self-penned knockabout and contributions from his favourite songwriters.

The opener, Gary Moore’s “Johnny Boy”, might as well by now be a traditional song — it is clearly in dialogue with “Danny Boy”. “Is it you I hear calling?” Moore asks, as he hears the wind blowing across the Wicklow Mountains. Harmonica traces the melody, then a skirl of uilleann pipes from Mark Redmond. But a synthesised orchestral backing cloys and drags the pace.

Things pick up on “Clock Winds Down”, an urgent dispatch from the front lines of the climate wars. “The ice caps melt, the Amazon burns . . . See the children take to the street when they hear Greta Thunberg speak.” Some chattering glossolalia. “It’s hard to know what to say/when a child looks up and says/hey old man, what did you do/we were depending on you.”

There is a frozen quality to “Greenland”, half a paean to explorers, stuffed with caribou and narwhals, half a metaphor for the stasis of the lockdowns. The title track is a rollicking tale of “16 fishermen raving, out on the town on E”, each one “carrying his own caul” as a protection against drowning.

The most sombre moment is “December 1942”, by the Cork songwriter Ricky Lynch, which watches a train from the Warsaw ghetto arriving at Auschwitz “to unload its human cargo/met by demons and by devils and their savage dogs”. Its bleak hopelessness segues then into “Van Diemen’s Land”, with poachers transported to Australia, tied up “two-by-two like horses in a dray”.

Moore has always had a keen feeling for the trials and the glory of manual labour: the mandolin thrashes as he celebrates the “Bord na Móna Man”, the roving turf cutters who spread out across the world. “He opened up the Klondike and he blazed the Yukon trail/crushed grapes in California before Columbus had set sail.” It ends with musical heroes: “Zozimus and Zimmerman” sees the Victorian street singer tip his hat to Bob Dylan as he storms through a Dublin gig; and then a quiet, spare reading of “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”.

★★★☆☆

‘Flying Into Mystery’ is released by Sony