Dropkick Murphys

Less than a year after their last visit, Dropkick Murphys are back to check in on the Old Continent with a handful of dates scattered mostly across central Europe, including a stop in Hohenems, a cold, gloomy industrial town on the border between Austria and Switzerland: the venue is hardly the stuff of dreams, but twelve months without seeing them live is simply too long for yours truly.

The Event Center is sold out, and you can practically touch the anticipation turning into pure adrenaline the moment the lights go down and the speakers blast out "The Foggy Dew" sung by the magnificent Sinead O'Connor, the standard prologue to every Murphys show; then the seven from Boston storm the stage and all hell breaks loose! They kick off with "Shipping Up To Boston", the theme from Martin Scorsese's latest film, and it almost feels like being on set near Fenway Park, soaking in the Irish atmosphere; Ken Casey & co. are in blistering form and give the Austrian kids not a second's rest, unloading tons of their trademark blend of Oi!, kombat-folk and street-punk, all flattened guitars, bagpipes, accordion, banjo, wild drumming and street attitude, distilled to perfection in "Heroes of Our Past", "The Rocky Road To Dublin" and "Your Spirit's Alive".

Al Barr is a stage animal through and through, all heart and grit, and his acid-edged voice tears into classics like "Barroom Hero", "Boys On The Docks" and "Finnegan's Wake", making them even more adrenaline-charged than on the "Do Or Die" vinyl; you can feel an absolute chemistry between the band members, evident in the way Casey's vocal lines coil around the lead vocalist's in their duets before dissolving into hooligan-style chants belted out by the whole band, or in the way they leap tirelessly from one side of the stage to the other, almost possessed, enough to make you wonder whether the show might last only half an hour — after all, the guys standing in front of you have been over thirty for a good few years now...

The tracklist is almost perfect: plenty of room for the older, more captivating songs ("10 Years Of Service", "The Legend Of Fin MacCummhail"), whose choruses are drowned out by the whole crowd's shout-along, without neglecting material taken from "Blackout" and from the less convincing "The Warrior's Code" (the performance of "Walk Away" is spine-chilling). But it doesn't matter, because any song announced by Casey is met with delirium from the diehards in the moshpit, amid crowd-surfing and raised fists in perfect Oi! spirit.

It's a symbiosis that reaches completion when Barr, microphone in hand, dives into the crowd to let some lucky kid sing five seconds of "This Is Your Life", before reclaiming the stage with a handful of covers of traditional Celtic songs, of course distorted and pushed to insane speeds: the danceable "Captain Kelly's Kitchen", the "Auld Triangle" of Poguesian memory, and the anthem "The Wild Rover", in which the Murphys show off their instrumental versatility, taking turns on mandolin, banjo, accordion and bagpipes, while a tireless Matt Kelly, behind the drums, finishes off whatever folk element was left in the original versions!

You'd just like to step a few metres away from the pit, catch your breath and exchange a few words with a local in your Trapattoni-style German, but the moment you turn your back to the stage, Lynch strikes up the blue collar anthem "The Gauntlet", and its chorus championing the working class drags you bodily back into the inferno, and you can't help but scream "Stand Up And Fight! And I'll Stand Up With You" even as you start tasting blood rising in your throat.

At last the Boston combo takes five minutes to grab a pint of stout backstage, leaving you to tally up the songs already played and worry about the ones you'll inevitably miss. The show picks back up with a "Black Velvet Band" redolent of the green of Ireland, before throwing itself into the oldschool hardcore fury of "Citizien C.I.A." and the Oi! of "Road Of The Righteous"; the chorus of the poppy "Sunshine Highway" brings things back to the more melodic territory so dear to the latest-era Dropkick Murphys, while the 70s punk of "Workers' Song" closes out the overview of all the influences that have brought this phenomenal live band to its current heights.

Our heroes don't forget their more introspective, romantic side either, delivering semi-acoustic versions of "Forever" and "Bastards On Parade", with at least half the crowd magically baring their hearts to sing about their fears and hopes for a future spent with someone special... foreveeeeeeeeeeeeeeer! Still, you don't have much time to get wistful, since the majestic Spicy McHaggis and his bagpipes have taken over the stage for the closing showcase: as usual, about a dozen local riot grrrls (all of excellent quality, by the way) are brought up on stage to dance and sing "The Spicy McHaggis Gig" among the Murphys, a scene repeated for the bucolic "Kiss Me I'm Shitfaced!" before the Grand Finale... Casey, Barr and Lynch hand their microphones to some thirty possessed kids who've climbed on stage to scream "Skinhead On The MBTA" to the heavens alongside their idols, the band's true manifesto.

And when you climb down from those two metres up, clutching the show's tracklist torn with your own teeth from the amplifier and a plectrum handed to you by Lynch himself, driving 300 kilometres to see a Dropkick Murphys show suddenly feels like one of the smartest ideas you've ever had.

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