Inversions

While O'Hooley & Tidow's sprightly ‘Gentleman Jack’ has become the theme tune for Sally Wainwright's acclaimed new drama series of the same name, this quietly beautiful set mixes reflective songs, solo piano pieces and spoken word with tune sets whose source is her late father and his place in the music traditions that stretched through the menfolk of the Ox Mountains of County Sligo.

O'Hooley is the first woman to be handed the tradition, while using the idea of inversions – ‘a reversal of the norm’ – to open the palm across those source tunes and to transmogrify them. ‘The Bonny Boy’, a song her dad used to sing, and which she sang at his funeral, is a fine example of this process, as are ‘The Swallow's Tail’ and ‘The Hills of Greenmore’, learned from Dervish's Cathy Jordan. The closing ‘My Father's Reel’ is an intense and involving poem of family, childhood and tradition, of the divisions of patriarchy and the conflicts between her and her father that did not necessarily resolve themselves the way tunes can. Set to spectral splashes of piano, ebbing and flowing to memory-rich evocations of the poetry, this is an arresting closer to an intimate set.