Biird at Vicar Street review: Consummate musicians deliver radical trad for the TikTok generation
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
'We represent the best of Ireland,' says Lisa Canny, harpist, banjo player and frontwoman of the 11-strong trad girl group Biird.
At a sold-out Vicar Street on Saturday night, their easy confidence is intoxicating as this huge group of musicians dressed to the nines play some hair-raising trad.
The girl group formed in September 2023, when they were invited to perform at one of Annie Macmanus's literary nights at London Irish Centre. A little over a year and a half later, having already played around the corner earlier in the day, at Guinness's Lovely Days Live festival, they're performing to more than 1,000 people with not so much as a single released. It's a sight to behold.
'What I loved about the girl-band thing growing up is that it was a group of girls who looked like they were having the time of their lives, doing the best things of girlhood well into their adulthood, dressing up and playing tunes,' Canny says.
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The concept behind Biird is a combination of consummate musicians and clever marketing for the TikTok generation: it's cool, it's slick and it's young – as demonstrated by a highlight of the gig, the group's reimagining of Gypsy Woman, the house track by Crystal Waters. The la-da-dees of its chorus are not dissimilar to the nas of lilting.
The band also deliver several sultry lilts in a set list punctuated with Irish-dancing accompaniments from performers as gorgeous and styled as the band.
At one point Canny turns to the crowd and says that Biird visualise a new type of Irish music, with 'none of this paddywhackery and green rivers'. Certainly, between the international success of Lankum and the emergence of bands that are rethinking what it means to play the fiddle, such as The Scratch, they're part of the radical rebrand of trad.
The only things lacking tonight are original songs. Biird play the three tunes that they've written themselves, but none of these has been released yet. If this is the kind of crowd the group can pull, and the energy they can create, based on nothing more than posters and word of mouth, what could they achieve with an album?
This is a huge production from start to finish, and not only because of the 11 players on stage. Biird have proved the concept: make trad accessible to a new audience and it will come. The crowd at Vicar Street is young and stylish, a distinctly more urban and hipster listener.
There's something admirably ballsy about Biird's unabashed ambition, a trait that is distinctly un-Irish, even if their music is as Irish as bread and butter.
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