Spontaneity crucial to Eddi’s musical success

An engaging and charismatic live performer, Eddi Reader comes to the Town Hall on Tuesday, February 14. Eddi will be drawing from her recent Best Of, a collection that spans a career that took flight in the late 1980s.

Patience of Angels will surely feature the excellent Boo Hewerdine song she released in 1994.  Eddi recalls the moment when the song became part of her show.

“It was backstage at the Irish Centre in Leeds,” she says. “I was touring with Boo and Clive Gregson, and I remember hearing it and I thought ‘I know what I’m going to do with that.’

“I thought that song was my story and I wanted to try to impart it,” she adds. “So, I tried it on for size, and Boo played the chords. And I said ‘right, we’re going to play it to this audience and see what they think’. That was a year or two before I recorded it.”

Like many of the songs in her set, Eddie has been performing that particular number for a long time yet her shows are never ‘by-the-number’.

Does the meaning of the songs and how she performs them change over time?

“Yeah, they do actually. They do come out in different ways,” she says. “I’m quite spontaneous, I’m always surprised by what’s going to come out next.  The band don’t know, I don’t know!”

It’s this sense that a show is happening before you, the freedom Eddi seems to have onstage, that set her gigs apart.

“I’m quite a generous, free conductress so I allow all sorts of inspiration to come onstage with me,” she says. “I like to keep the musicians buoyant, and in their own energy. But if something’s going down a road that I think is unemotional, I tend to rein it back in. So we can calm it down a wee bit, and hear what the song is saying to us.”

Eddi cultivated her ear for songs when she began going to folk clubs in Scotland in the late 1970s. To this day, she prefers discovering songs in a live setting, rather than trawling through the demo tapes people send her.

“If someone sends you a song on a tape, it doesn’t have the same energy,” she says. “When you see performers performing music, it’s that kernel of something that you recognise in a song. It’s the thing that’s beneath what they’re doing, that even they don’t know is happening. That’s what I’m attracted to.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.