Mike McKeon’s ‘Irish Jimmy’ is a beguiling blend of stories and songs that makes for a very enjoyable hour’s entertainment. It is perfectly suited to this wonderful venue, plays for the next two nights and, along with the Third Eye’s other abundant attractions, would make a perfect entrée to Fringe events timed for later in the evening.  

McKeon is blessed with a rich resonant voice and has a beautiful, clean and equally resonant guitar sound. He uses these assets to great effect in recounting stories from his family history, especially those that flow from his paternal grandfather, the Irishman Jimmy McKeon.

This is rich material, spanning three generations and the very well-crafted script does a nice job of presenting it without overstatement and with an evocative sense of time and place. The songs are well placed and some, like ‘Silent Man’, available on YouTube, are memorable in their own right and deserve a wider audience. This was the show’s first performance and it was very enthusiastically received on its opening night.  

Fringe shows are, almost by definition, works in progress and this one, despite already being very successful, has a lot of potential for further development. In particular it needs to do more of what it says on the tin. If these are “stories and songs about songs and stories” then the stories need to shed light on the songs, the better for the songs to shed light on the stories.

In fact, we don’t learn anything about the family’s musical world – not one song or piece of music is mentioned. The show opens with a song in twelve bar blues about Mike’s mother singing in the kitchen at nights and the magical experience that was for the young boy. But we never learn what his mother was singing and how it might have played into the music we are hearing now. His mother might have been singing blues songs – or the music she grew up with in the pub where she was raised. Either way we need to know. As it stands, this number feels like a real disconnect between form and content and not the right start at all.

Things get a whole lot better musically when Mike drops the blues mask and relies on his own riffs and chord progressions, where plenty of talent is obvious and we can hear a distinctive blend of the past and the present coming through. ‘Silent Man’, for example, is a subtle take on the emotional strategies passed down to Mike from his grandfather and father. Even here, though, I think, the connections between story and song can be made a little clearer.

In general, too, I think there is plenty of scope for this performer to enter more fully into his material. That includes really telling his stories, from memory and in the moment, rather than reading them.  

This was the debut performance of ‘Irish Jimmy’ and the warmth of its reception – verging on the rapturous – should give Mike and his very able collaborator Sameena Zehra the confidence to go ahead and forge a masterpiece.  

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