Year
2017
Finbar Furey marks his 70th birthday with his new album, Paddy Dear, consisting of a brace of new songs from the legendary balladeer, along with covers of
The Galway Shawl and
He’ll Have to Go.
We Built a Home opens with a sparky run of banjo picking resting on co-producer Peter Eades effective keyboard. The veteran balladeer is passionately committed to his own Famine-era lyric, denouncing unequivocally “cold, cold genocide” a term which one of those revisionist people might baulk at. Yet Finbar tells it straight.
He is on very familiar ground on the second track,
The Galway Shawl, popular 40 years ago in every formica-trimmed lounge bar from Clonakility to Cardonagh to Kilburn. The song was revived ten years ago in a version by Patrick Street on their 2007 album,