It's easy to hear how Declan Sinnott lulled a holidaying music company executive into offering him a recording contract.
Sinnott has a warm, relaxed and intimate performing style, a clear singing voice and an admirably self-sufficient guitar capability, and while there was a sense here that he and his partner, singer Vickie Keating, might have another few gears to move up through, they gave a satisfying account of a repertoire drawn from myriad sources.
Sinnott's first album, I Like The Noise It Makes, is about to be followed by another and he is clearly relishing the re-discovery of his songwriting muse in his sixties. The album's title track, gleaned from a response attributed to John Lennon about what makes a good song good, and the deftly accompanied and attractively defiant Blood Is Rushing Through These Veins confirmed Sinnott as a writer of no little skill.
It was the breadth of items that possibly fed into his songwriting that impressed slightly more, however, with Sinnott and Keating bringing out the traditional ballad background of Bob Dylan's Boots Of Spanish Leather with an appealing frankness, forming a voice and guitar partnership almost equivalent to Astaire & Rodgers on the nimbly swinging Puttin' On The Ritz, and giving In The Wee Small Hours a compelling folksy warmth.
A perhaps more unlikely folk song was Billy Fury's hit I Will, which Sinnott transformed into a finger-picked cousin of the country blues reminiscent of Duffy Power's Mississippification of the Beatles' I Saw Her Stranding There - and rendered all the more potent for its stark guitar arrangement and the quiet but absolute conviction and essential honesty of Sinnott's singing.
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