Ultan Conlon - The Starlight Ballroom (2023)

The title of Ultan Conlon’s ‘The Starlight Ballroom’ comes from a historic music venue in Carrowbeg on the Castlebar Road in Westport, Co. Mayo. Opening on Friday, 21st February 1969, with Tony Chambers, the San-Antones, Dickie Rock and the Miami Showband, the venue featured a revolving stage and “night sky” ceiling lit with 2,000 fairy lights. It quickly established itself as one of the county’s prime live venues, hosting Irish showbands and international acts such as Marmalade and, famously, Roy Orbison on April 9th, 1969. Ultan, who comes from Loughrea in Galway, recalls his appearance on the strummed guitar, strings and piano-backed slow-walking title track, also mentioning Daddy Cool and the Lollipops, the last band to play there when it closed in 1981. Talking of how “Everybody came to the town that day, Jackie in her old blue heels/Ronan from Knock on a motorbike and Bridget from Toormakeady”, the song also sketches the end and start of a romance between the three characters, “when Ronan winked and Bridget caught his broad smile”.

Variously backed by David Garza on guitars, piano and banjo, John Would on lap steel, Dave Curtis on strings, drummer Amy Wood and Sebastian Steinberg on double bass, that air of nostalgia for times past also permeates two other numbers featuring Eddi Reader and again mentioning the Starlight, The Old Songs is a pub sing and swayalong populated by the likes of “big Mike in the corner/After 12 pints of stout/With a falsetto tone,” Billy from Dublin who “takes over the night/With a glass in one hand and the other the mic” and Tess with “a bun in her hair in a room plied with drink” who plays “Enjoy Yourself, It’s later than you think...,” as the crowd join with such favourites as Dirty Old Town, Raglan Road, The Wild Rover, I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen, The Mountains Of Mourn and The Wichita Lineman. But beneath this runs a question about who will keep these songs and traditions alive and “sing the old songs…when all the old timers are gone.”

On a different note, the dreamy piano-accompanied, gradually building Paradise Lane is a family memory inspired by his mother who grew up in Meelick and, as a child, often heard people mention a street in nearby Eyrecourt and went in search of this imagined wonderland (“mum woke by the River Shannon where the boats go by/Saddled up ready to cycle across the countryside/To find a place she’d only heard its name” and found that while “it’s only a house or two/But she’s still amazed what the mind of a child full of wonder can do/To find a place beyond the wind and rain… The little girl with the big dream is paradise bound/To find a place beyond the tears and pain”).

Elsewhere you’ll find character sketches, such as the 50s doo-wop flavoured All Sewn Up (“Look at that guy, see him strut/Hard as nails his collar turned up…Suit pressed tight, shoes always shined/Hair slicked back, million dollar smile”), a playful self-referencing number inspired by reading about other musicians and how “they know the right people but they got it wrong/My song’s the winner by a good furlong”, that amusingly (and punningly) declares “Ultan has a tan, out in LA/The fool got a selfie with Shawn Mendes” where “a 10 minute set at the hotel café” suggests he’s not got it all sewn up at all (“It’s not the reality/We all live in dreams”).

Or then, opening the album, where “the cemetery whispers so many names”, there’s the string-swathed, piano and keys adorned Susie Gossip as, seeing her headstone, he ponders “how she lived her life”, the village’s own Eleanor Rigby, “a mom and a loving wife/She’d say you got to hold on to the ones who treat you right/It’s like a good run at the picture house /Or like a movie that stays with you long after the crowds gone”, leading him to want to keep her alive in his music (“I want to write you the world’s greatest song/And sing about how much you meant to everyone/Gonna tell the town bout the good you done”).

There are, of course, also love songs and songs of self-reflection, the former captured with the volatile relationship of the piano plangent Hurts Like Heaven (“After each fight we’d connect in bed/Then I’d go rogue and you’d stay quiet/We’d push that love back deep inside/Where our light can’t shine and our love don’t grow/Hurts me more than you’ll ever know…Does my touch leave you cold babe?/I’m still trying to figure you out”) and, stained by lap steel chimes, the equal uncertainty of the forthright bluesy folk Don’t Tell Me That You Love Me, Prove It (“Is our time up have we drained this cup of love and cheer?/Is it too late are we tempting faith with each new tear?/Can we make it through the years? /Don’t tell me that you love me, prove it/Or lose it”).

More introspective, the strummed The Sunday Blues, where he sounds a bit like an Irish Willie Nelson, has him confessing, “All I do is worry about things/Everything I do/I wish I didn’t care for anything/The different ways I feel about you… I wish I didn’t feel for anything/Like some folks don’t give two fucks”. Then, on the robustly strummed, piano-accompanied Rivertown with its echoes of country soul Van Morrison, he finds contentment that is elusive in many of the other numbers (“Here I am in a rivertown/Watch the wheels go round and round/Some say it’s no way to live/But my roots are here and my heart’s content”), a love letter to his home in Ahascragh, a village on the Ahascragh/Bunowen River where “Folks are sound they wave hello”.

And, finally, the bounciest track on the album with its driving drum beat and the Orbison-esque shades of the chorus, there’s Working For The Man, not, as you might think a lament about the 9-5 grind that the opening lines “Wake up in the morning and go down the stairs/Pick up my shoes from under the chair /Ready for the day, ready to pay my way/Someone’s got the blues in the staff room/Gonna lend an ear and throw my two cents in”, and talk of mates shirking between packing goods in the yard but rather about adopting an attitude that lines up your priorities and focus (“All day long I work for the man, the man in me/There ain’t no way I’m gonna lay in bed and let my head get the better of me”).

Those ballrooms of romance are long gone, but as long as people like Ultan Conlon keep making music like this fabulous album, their souls, spirits, and the old songs will continue to live on.