Damien Rice's first two albums, released in 2002 and 2006 respectively, were of a world in which people wanted to feel; his third, in 2014, years after the financial crash, was of a world in which they didn’t. In which the chart-topping music, at least in the UK, was centred mostly around rendering oneself insensate through drink, with lyrics that featured every possible combination of the words 'tonight', 'young' and 'forever'.
But time is a circle, and we’re ready to be sad again.
Anybody that has ever been in love has a friend in Damien Rice. His songs are wistful elegies to those that have gone from our lives, and the memories – sometimes soothing, sometimes haunting – left in their wake. Most will be aware of his early work. The likes of Cannonball, Blower’s Daughter and 9 Crimes were part of the backdrop of the early-to-mid noughties. Songs that made being sad feel good.
If there’s a single word to describe Damien Rice, it’s intimate. As much his music – with the likes of Amie feeling like an at-the-beach serenade – as his performances. Last night’s performance, at the O2 Apollo in Manchester, was no exception. Damien Rice is as consistent as his music. Which, almost always, involves a disconsolate piano or guitar bleeding into his characteristic, dream-inducing voice, giving the listener the sensation of being in, on top of or under water.
Rice is famous for eschewing publicity. Like many that have come before, not least Kurt Cobain and Eliot Smith, he's been known to view the music industry as something of a necessary evil. And sometimes, given his operate-outside-the-system antics, as just an evil. But times have changed. The world that first met Damien Rice in 2002 is very different from the world today. The party has successfully died; culturally, we’re in that before-going-home moment usually filled by Wonderwall and The Scientist. That is to say, we’re ready for Rice’s return.
So what's Rice been up to? He's been busking. He's been performing impromptu gigs across European cities. No press; no announcement. The ideal turn-the-corner surprise for a would-be flaneur, or inveterate ennui. These performances are discovered after-the-fact through wobbly, low-res video footage posted online. He’s been, by all accounts, living. Taking his time. An artist through and through.
A few things are different about Damien Rice. Most notably, the absence of Lisa Hannigan: a fellow Irish musician and close collaborator on his first two albums, once-upon-a-time girlfriend and perennial muse.
Instead, supporting last night’s performance was Sílvia Pérez Cruz, a Catalonian and Spanish singer with an eerie, powerful voice, a perfect complement to Rice’s, able to affect the female harmonies of his early work. The experience was unique. Having heard Damien Rice’s albums countless times, I’ve never heard him sound like this. A unique talent perfectly in control; a humble performer able to engage his audience – at the end, he self-effacingly thanked us for remembering who he is – and somebody who, it feels, is now able to summon the past and its provocations without attachment.
Also, playing before Rice, Cruz managed to coax a room of mostly British people into singing in another language: three-a-piece repetitions of the word mañana: tomorrow in Spanish. This, in addition to her significant talent, deserves special recognition.
Rice and Sylvia executed an exquisite duet of 9 Crimes. He invited an audience member on-stage – always a risk, he nervously joked – to perform Cold Water, and got the audience to provide the looped backing at the end of Volcano.
Listening to Rice once, somebody I was with referred to his music as 'whispering', comparable to, say, James Blunt or James Morrison. Singers with serenading voices, whose music provided the track to awkward, fumbling first dates. But I'd reject that; Damien Rice is a very different artist. Songs such as Rootless Tree and I Remember are immense in that they sound like a softly lapping wave, and then surprise you with the torrent that gathers beneath. It’s his combination of softness and severity that distinguishes him; a truer, more authentic reflection of human connection, its turbulence and precarity.
His music isn’t sad music – though he did joke that we’d all come to get depressed. It’s powerful. Innervating and reverberating. Music that yearns, that pulls at something deep and universal. In exploring his past, his music allows us to see our own histories as more beautiful, more meaningful than they likely were.
But for all of this, it feels as though Rice is finally ready to look to the future. Introducing his first song, an unnamed new piece, he joked that it was the most hopeful song he’s got. That’s not a high bar to beat – but it sounded great, as did the other two more recent additions to his catalogue: Astronaut and Song for Berta. Damien Rice, it feels, has a new muse, and is ready to take us on new journeys.
