With her blond hair, angelic looks, stylish dress and cut-glass voice, the fragrant serenity of Cara Dillon will always turn heads and please ears. You would need an oaken heart not to be moved when – with husband Sam Lakeman painting patterns of perfect delicacy on the piano behind her – she opens with an acutely tender treatment of the poignant Beth Sorrentino song River Run … and closes it 90 minutes later with the even more sorrowful leaving anthem, The Parting Glass.
Her strong grounding in the Irish tradition was diverted for several years by an abortive major-label attempt to polish her up for pop stardom. She now marries the two seemingly alien styles in a way that, while perhaps too polite to please fans of hardcore folk, perches her on the edge of mainstream acceptance. Accusations of blandness may be levelled at her latest album, A Thousand Hearts, but Dillon on stage is far more compelling, partly because she is just so likable.
Chit-chatting away with the audience as if they were neighbours over the garden fence (we hear about her kids’ birthday party, house-moving traumas and her sister’s rat infestation), her admirable six-piece band includes some of folk’s finest – Luke Daniels (accordion), Ed Boyd (guitar) and surely the greatest living bodhran player, John Joe Kelly, among them. They don’t get much opportunity to flex their muscles, but they do add weight, credence and folkie context, while the formidable bluegrass guitarist/singer Dan Tyminski – who had already played an enjoyable support set – joins them for his own greatest hit, Man of Constant Sorrow.
Cara is superb on fragility and melancholy; less convincing on upbeat and clapalongs. Commendably, though, she still sings a couple of Irish-language songs, still retains her distinctive Derry vowels, and when she does There Were Roses – Tommy Sands’ enduringly affecting morality tale from the Troubles – she still breaks your heart.
