Live Review: Danú, Irish Cultural Centre, London (June 21, 2025)

“Fasten your seatbelts, get ready for take-off,” warns Danú’s founding member, melodeon player Benny McCarthy, and he’s only half joking.

As the crack seven-piece, who are celebrating 30 years of music making, launch into the opening tune to a full house at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, they demonstrate that, in the right hands, music really can take off and take the whole room along with it. And so it was with the group gear-shift from jig to reel, and what feels like a musical handbrake turn and getaway, a rhythmic dive under the high, keening wind of the main tune. Even singer Nell Ní Chróinín looks taken aback by the reel’s driving energy, and that sense of release continues throughout the evening’s sets of jigs, reels and songs, fired with the spirit of a midsummer night’s ebullient misrule.

The shifting, ranging band dynamics that swell and surge around the songs – including a truly wonderful take on Nic Jones’ ‘Ten Thousand Miles’ and Gene MacLellan’s Canuck-country classic, ‘Snowbird’ – find themselves unleashed and running at full pelt on the wilder sets, jigs and reels.

St. John’s, Canada-based bodhrán player Billy Sutton introduces a set of Newfoundland ‘singles’, that open and close like magic boxes full of sympathetic musical wonders that feel too big for the little tunes that contain them, but that containment and its expansion is part and parcel of the uplifting power of Danú’s performances, and the musical traditions they draw up and launch into flight.

Highlights range from ‘An Cailín Rua’ (The Red Haired Girl), a profoundly moving sean-nós Nell sings on stage at the start of the second half – captivating the audience with just a couple of heart-breaking verses – to the extraordinary drone architecture of Ivan Goff’s uilleann pipes air, heavier even than Lankum’s. It’s one hell of a 30th birthday bash.