The fourth night of CityFolk delivered an evening that swung from intimate, subdued songs to Celtic rock crowd-surfing singalongs, headlined by English Celtic punk band, The Pogues.
The picturesque Saturday evening brought hordes of fans to Ottawa’s Lansdowne Park, which quickly filled up as the hours flew by.
Kicking off the evening, a modest but fast-growing crowd gathered at the Fasken Stage for Indigenous performer Caleigh Cardinal’s set of strong, clear vocals and sharp storytelling.
She turned up the energy with “Just Let Me Lie to You,” a cheeky tune about the perils of dating apps — specifically Tinder.
The arrangement leaned on thumping drums and mixing that sometimes pushed the guitar a touch too far into the background, but Cardinal’s voice cut through the percussion with authority. The audience responded with polite but engaged clapping and foot tapping.
Cardinal followed with “Don’t Waste Your Love on Me,” a jazzy number she wrote about a persistent admirer. A Lake Street Dive-adjacent vibe, the 2024 tune is bursting with sway and soul. “There Ain’t No Way” and a cover of “Ahead by a Century” were set highlights — the latter reimagined as a more soulful, drums-and-keys-forward version than listeners might expect.
Slower moments like “Light of the Moon” and “Wandering River,” the piano-only ballad about her time spent in Alberta, showed off the more intimate side of her voice.
Around the corner on the main stage, the Dropkick Murphys opened with the visceral punch of “The Boys Are Back,” with a giant screen behind the band flashing archival Boston Bruins fight footage.
Frontman Ken Casey, vocals hard-hitting as ever, made clear his band’s loyalties, announcing they “stood with Canada” amid tensions with the United States. The short speech bled into the anthemic “Who Will Stand With Us” and spurred a pit that quickly filled with crowd-surfers, moshers and the occasional airborne beer.
The band rode that electricity through a relentless set, which featured the massive gang vocals and pounding drums of “Boys on the Docks,” plus fan-friendly moments like hauling young audience members onstage.
The hard rockers mixed in new material, including “Chesterfields and Aftershave,” which landed as a more subdued point in the set but still earned cheers.
They also threaded in overt political sentiment (“There’s some f⸺ed up s⸺ south of your border,” “Power in the union, power in solidarity”) before charging into “School Days Over” and an impromptu, rare performance of “Green Fields of France,” which the band said had only played live once before, earlier this month.
Chants of the band’s name echoed across the crowd by the time the band reached “Rose Tattoo” and the beefy, raucous “First Ones to Die.”
The group capped things off with a tribute to late Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, who Casey said “meant so much to all of us” before rolling into “One Last Goodbye,” its first live performance of the track in Canada.
The band then exploded into fan favourite “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” sure to leave attendees with ringing ears.
A half-hour after Dropkick’s seismic energy, The Pogues, currently on the tail end of their 40th anniversary tour of the album Rum Sodomy & the Lash, offered a more jagged charm.
Their set opened instrumentally and settled into classics like “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” Lead singer and flute man Peter “Spider” Stacy — generous in his praise for Dropkick — introduced band members between numbers, including several young newcomers touring with the band on this leg.
Stacy, 66, has taken on frontman duties since the passing of MacGowan in 2023 and was admirable in his role, but he looked tired and strung out at times, holding a water bottle in his hand nearly the entire set. He and the band took some time to get comfortable, but found their stride toward the end of the evening.
At times, the heavy mix of instruments worked against them: a striking example was “Billy’s Bones,” where the arrangement, including banjo, saxophone, drums, guitar and bass, tended to drown out Stacy’s vocals.
Still, when everything clicked, it was vintage Pogues magic.
“Sally MacLennane” was an early highlight — tight, fast and driving, with banjo and drums that earned thunderous applause. “The Old Main Drag” landed as another standout.
The band’s tender side came through most poignantly on “The Parting Glass,” a respectful, stirring tribute to MacGowan sung beautifully by guest vocalist Lisa O’Neill, whose voice floated over wind instruments and brass. O’Neill also led a rapturous “Dirty Old Town,” with the harmonica cue deriving a loud singalong from the audience.
“Rainy Night in Soho” slowed things down into quiet swaying and slow dances. Here, the wind and brass were particularly well-balanced, producing the evening’s best instrumental mix.
The band picked up the tempo again with “Streams of Whiskey” and “Boys from the County Hell.”
“You’ve been f⸺ing brilliant,” Stacy said to the thousands-strong crowd. “Thank you.”
Featured image by Murray Oliver/the Charlatan
