With tonight’s scheduling making it hard to capture multiple performances, the end of Lisa O’Neill’s fabulous Llais set is sacrificed in favour of a decent chunk of Blacksabbathmode’s similarly brilliant outing. Advertising offers for purchases of tickets to more than one show, the festival’s organisers clearly want attendees to hit up several events in one visit, but such efforts at the box office are undermined by the impossibility of catching multiple performances in full.
Compounding this, some clashes are between acts which would clearly share audiences: during Lisa O’Neill’s set in the Donald Gordon Theatre, the Staves are performing in Hoddinott Hall next door. Still, the Wales Millennium Centre has a healthy buzz to it (helped considerably by the post-Covid transformation of the bar area) and there is a real sense of anticipation amongst those flooding in to see O’Neill kickstart the evening’s performances.
A well-founded one, too. It’s difficult to overstate the brilliance of this performance: the Cavan singer makes light work of the huge room, with her naturally warm and charismatic presence drawing the audience in and creating a sense of easy intimacy. During Old Note, O’Neill pirouettes from side to side of the vast stage, gently ringing a string of bells, while a sample of her then three-year-old niece plays out dreamily.
“Thanks for listening to my little stories,” she says to us, self-deprecatingly – but her spoken interludes lend so much magnetism to her performance; whether discussing sexual repression in Ireland or the powerful omnipresence of music in her life, she is never less than an enthralling speaker. Tracks from O’Neill’s glorious 2023 album All of This Is Chance are aired with a three-piece band, and as warmly as they’re lapped up by the audience, she tells us it feels a long time since she wrote them, adding welcome news of a new album on the way.
A short sprint then to the Cabaret, where a small but keenly engaged crowd is being treated to a performance of rare musicality and brilliant imagination by Blacksabbathmode. “Heavy metal is a gateway drug to jazz,” declares pianist Robbie Moore, describing the journey that this conservatoire-trained improvising trio have taken to find them reinterpreting Paranoid in a cabaret bar in Cardiff.
From Birmingham, like Black Sabbath themselves, Moore and his brother Ewan (who also perform as Bigheadmode) sought to use their jazz chops to pay tribute to the godfathers of heavy metal, bringing in the astonishing vocal talents of Porthcawl native Plumm to complete the line up. They make a fine racket: not so much covering Sabbath classics like Supernaut as deconstructing them, melting down the originals and recasting them as magnificent new musical structures.
Ewan’s skittering beats provide a series of peaks for Plumm’s powerful vocals to surmount, and peroxide pianist Robbie runs his keys through various effects to deliver Iommi-esque moments of heft. Thanking the crowd, Robbie congratulates them for taking a punt on something so esoteric, but there’s no-one in here regretting their choice.
Llais: Lisa O’Neill / Blacksabbathmode, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Fri 11 Oct
words HUGH RUSSELL
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