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If Michael McDermott was a cocktail, he would be a mix of Dylan for his poetry, Springsteen for his fire, Waits for his delivery, and a large twist of Jack Daniels for his love of alcohol.  His songs have four main themes: alcohol, failed relationships, spirituality and self-destruction.  Put these together and you have the makings for an emotionally charged evening, and that is exactly what the audience got.

Opening with “Broken” from his new album Noise From Words, the intensity of his singing and guitar playing quickly silenced a noisy London crowd.  “Broken” seems to sum Michael up, and the song covers many aspects of his life: rejection, his struggles with faith (“…say a prayer tonight for the broken”), his love of whisky and the constant glimmer of hope. 

The next two songs followed in the same mode “Still Ain’t Over You Yet” about his failed attempt to get engaged to the girl he had been steady with for a while, but who had ditched him after he had made a "mess of things" (the title of another track from Noise From Words); and “She’s Gonna Kill Me,” a song that probably half the audience could relate to being out on the town, and always looking for that one last watering hole before going home to bed. 

“Arm Yourself” from the Ashes album came next; a song dedicated to a cousin back home in the States who had been drafted to go and fight in Iraq and thought that if he got married he could be excused the plan never worked.  As is Michael McDermott’s want, he has re-written the opening lines of the song, borrowing the lyrics from Martin L. Gore’s poignant ballad “In My Time of Dying.” “ In my time of dying, don’t want nobody to cry, and all I want for you to do, is take my body home.”  

There was no respite as he launched straight into “Cal Sag Road,” possibly the darkest of all the songs he has ever written, and perhaps the nearest he has come to emulating the story telling of Dylan in “Hurricane.”  It tells the tale of how he met two girls at a bar, ended up in a hotel room with them, before killing them both in a drunken haze and dumping their bodies in the river.  Described as a true story, it perhaps reflects all the demons that he finds himself fighting against every day. 

Finally, the evening mellowed as he switched to the piano to played Wounded, a song that beautifully reflects his struggle between life and God with the memorable lines “I’m going to wash my hands in the water, and dry them in the garden’s dirt”.  The set ended with the song NBC in New York banned him from playing live on Breakfast TV ­ American in Me.  He explained that when he played it at the Greenbelt Festival in the UK last year people kept coming up to him to say what a great song and how much they loved the way he had brought together the Blair/Bush relationship within the song.  This had confused him at the time as he had based the opening tune to the song on the old American hymn “My Country,’Tis of Thee” - ironically the same tune as “God Save the Queen.”  It is a song that has rightly found favor amongst the less conservative radio stations in the States.  Perhaps the most poignant line in it is “....sometimes I’m right, and sometimes I’m wrong, sometimes I go where I don’t belong, what’s liberty, history books are stained, sometimes I’m proud, sometimes I’m so ashamed, of the American in me...”  It’s a song that perhaps Barack Obama could be using on his campaign trail - but maybe he isn’t that brave.  

Michael claimed to not really understand about the politics behind the song, claiming he was just too thick.  I think this is just the demons speaking though - to write lyrics the way he does takes a lot of intelligence and understanding of the world around you, especially when it is often seen through an empty whiskey bottle.  Somehow I think we’ll be seeing him play in the UK again before not too long.