Planxty
Barbican, London EC2

Taking up the same stage positions they have occupied, on and off, since archive footage shot around the time they supported Donovan, Planxty, the fab four of Irish music, have re-formed for a few nights only, because they can. From left: Donal Lunny bobbing around on bouzouki, the dynamic time-keeper; Andy Irvine bent over decorous mandolin and mandola; Liam O’Flynn, modern master of the uilleann pipes, the only one in an ironed shirt; and the Buddha-like Christy Moore, one of Ireland’s best-loved singers, adding rhythm guitar and occasional keyboard.

This is an evening of highlights, not least the evident pleasure these fastidiously dedicated fiftysomethings take in working with each other again on Planxty’s quasi-baroque arrangements of traditional material gleaned over years. The way Moore leans forward listening to O’Flynn, his favourite piper, on the searing ‘Dark and Slender Boy’ (there is something at once prim and profane about the uilleann pipes; whenever they start up, the audience whoops); the quiet relish with which O’Flynn introduces Moore’s definitive rendition of ‘Little Musgrave’, an epic song of ‘love, lust, infidelity, jealousy… and murder’.

Then there’s the eternal melancholy of Irvine singing, slightly crumpled, his own heartbreaker, ‘As I Roved Out’; the 16-string perfection of his courtly mandolin trickling through the astonishing drive of Lunny’s left-handed bouzouki. The way it works every time – on a rollicking rake of Balkan-inflected polkas; a set of jigs honed to the basics (O’Flynn on whistle, Irvine’s delicate tracery and a double heartbeat of bodhrán from the bookending figures of old schoolfriends Moore and Lunny); unfolding organically on the elegant ‘Si Bheag, Si Mhor’ – the first tune ever written by the great 17th-century harper O’Carolan, and as O’Flynn says, ‘a hell of an effort’.