Monumentally good: John Francis Flynn, at the Dome, reviewed

John Francis Flynn is monumentally good. He’s kick-yourself-for-missing-him good. He’s so good that when he spoke between songs in the upstairs ballroom of an old Irish pub in Tufnell Park, it was almost a disappointment: how could the man making this extraordinary music be so normal?

Flynn is part of a cohort of Irish musicians revisiting traditional music. There’s the Mary Wallopers, in broad terms the most Pogues-ish. There’s Lankum, shortlisted for the Mercury Prize for their eyebrow-raising, droning experimentalism. There’s Lisa O’Neill, subdued and stern. And there’s Flynn, whose music dances from the unadornedly old-fashioned and Irish – the ‘Tralee Gaol’ played solo, on tin whistle – into something entirely different. He recast the American folk song ‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground’ into something new and different, part Nick Drake, part post-punk; the English sea shanty ‘Shallow Brown’ became something of a meditation, stately and glowering, owing more to post-rock’s imposing stillness than to the records that usually carry the writing credit ‘Trad Arr.’.