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“Australia's most gifted folk singer offers a superb collection of contemporary songs”
So many words have been written about John Howard's inability to reconcile himself with the country's indigenous community but when Enda Kenny, in Sorry Little Man,
writes “And what I can't understand/Is how in heaven can a five-letter word/Be too big for a five-foot man”, he encapsulates the whole situation. His further observation that “You can say
I've got an armband view of history” allows him the neat riposte, “I'd rather wear an armband than a blindfold any day”.
Don't, for one minute, think such lyric writing is easy. Bad folk singers abound. Great singer/songwriters are rare and they should be treasured and nurtured because, as has
happened with Eric Bogle, it is very easy for them to lose their muse and end up writing forgettable rubbish.
This is Kenny's fourth release since1994 (a sensibly modest output that has guaranteed a level of quality ensuring most of the rubbish has been discarded) and is a typical
mixture of Irish romanticism, hard-edged politics and nostalgia for long-past human caring and decency.
It really doesn't matter whether he's singing about Al Saunder's Garage, a delightful reminiscence about those people who through their commitment and good
works become the glue that holds small communities together, or Last Night at the Longford, a nostalgic farewell to an old cinema, Kenny is always accurate in his observations and sensitive in the way he
blends those observations to music.
His love songs are full of wit and whimsy. New Releases uses the imagery of a video shop (being visited on a Saturday night because, having broken up with his beloved. He has “nowhere else to go”) to plead for one more attempt to resuscitate a relationship that has died.
And the title track, Cloud Lining, takes the ordinariness of “looking out my back door” and turns it into a deeply felt rumination on how “Home is
something you make”. With its overtly Celtic arrangement and its very Australian imagery (“redbrick wall”, “jasmine flowers”) is a glorious distillation of two cultures.
Kenny's power lies in his ability to express his feelings and moods with great lyrical and musical precision. He knows how words and music work together and, when that
knowledge is attached to his warm, Irish voice and the excellent accompaniment (including Redgum's Hugh McDonald and Kavisha Mazella), he produces folk-based music of the highest order.
Bruce Elder – The Sydney Morning Herald
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