Foy Vance: The Homebird's Chorus

It’s after 10 o’clock at night. An eerily pale light still hangs outside. The grounds behind the Kings Hall auditorium throb with Irish teens, hundreds of them, all angsty and caffeinated. Camping tents dot a nearby field. The kids scurry around what seems like a carnival, a large open shelter with hacky-sackers and a dance-off, and two other tented spaces. Pretty quickly, I realize the mass gathering is of some Christian sort. “Summer Madness,” according to the kids’ T-shirts. There’s a prayer room, kids going in and out with intense looks on their faces.

I eventually find a line wrapping around a building called “The Cavern” and some kid tells me everyone’s waiting to see Foy. I decide to stick around out of curiosity. Upon entering the room, I grab floor space against the wall. Kids are humming, they’re packed in. This show is a really big deal to them.

Vance walks on stage wearing a tweed golfer’s hat and a black shirt that reads “CONSPIRATOR.” There’s no stage chit-chat to warm up the crowd. He launches into the first song, “Shed a Little Light,” bending guitar licks and groaning the intro. His lyrics personify Love as a guide: “Love walked right up to my face / She said you can only love what you’d die for babe / Shed a little light so I can find you / Don’t let darkness hide you from my face.”

Here is a 33-year-old man who knows the lament. His uncle was murdered; his brother beaten to a desperate state after walking down the wrong road. The glass from a Main Street bomb rained down on his back when he was the same age as tonight’s mostly teenage audience. Vance straddles a blurry line of psyche demarcation in Northern Ireland—on one side, those, like Charlie, who lived through the horror of the Troubles and still have a sluggish look in their eyes; the other, the younger kids who grew up during the aftermath, in the new Belfast, the blue-fish Belfast. Vance’s place in it all seems to allow some perspective, and his songs deliver a message different than swallowed hostility and unspoken history. He’s singing about how to find real peace.

“There is something about his music,” Jules Maxwell, Vance’s close friend and the pianist who played on Hope, informs me via email from London months later. “Something mysterious and passionate, dripping with a religion I don’t understand. Sometimes you don’t need to understand to feel.”

Even for a room of gathered religious folk, Vance’s singing emerges tonight differently than you might expect. His sound comes out big. It has faith wound up inside it, but in a more potent, less predictable way. You can sense a deep well of spirituality, but it stubbornly resists bottling, specificity or sappy, heart-tugging manipulation. It is, in a real sense, spiritual, like Bruce Springsteen’s “My City of Ruins.” And it immediately stills the crowd’s restlessness, quieting 400 teenagers, even knocking on my own fickle theology.

Vance tightens his mouth at times, singing out the right side. His neck flexes like it might burst, and his torso bends forward when stretching out a line, the headstock of his Lowden acoustic punching the dark. In this particular room, his music comes across like an old-time prophecy, very allegorical—at least to a foreigner uninvolved with the history of the city—and laced with subtle calls to forgiveness, healing, brotherhood, sorrow, homesickness, and a mystic’s belief in a heightened order of things. More simply, hope.

I leave the two-hour show to find a deserted Lisburn Road and a two-mile walk to the Europa Hotel. It’s pleasantly cold and about to rain.