It’s hard to imagine anyone better suited to bringing back larger scale concerts in the age of COVID-19 than Atlantic Canada’s high priest of good times Alan Doyle.
Admittedly, it must feel a little odd for the robust Newfoundland balladeer and his Beautiful Beautiful Band to be filling the air with foot-stomping anthems and danceable hits in the socially distanced, supper club atmosphere of a Halifax Convention Centre ballroom. But for the 200 fans of Doyle’s music — both from his solo and Great Big Sea careers — the restrictions and formalities of table seating were a small price to pay for the exhilarating novelty of an honest-to-goodness show.
“It’s Friday night in Halifax, God bless the bubble!” roared Doyle as he and his road-tested compadres tore into Come Out With Me.
“I’ve spent my whole life waiting for tonight,” he sang, and I’m sure to both the audience and Doyle, who played his last major show on March 8, it felt that way.
With keyboardist Chris Kirby doubling on accordion and violinist Kendel Carson setting her switch to fiddle, it didn’t take long for Doyle to jump into shanty mode with an old Great Big Sea standard Captain Kidd.
It seemed a perfect choice given it’s a short roll downhill to Privateer’s Warehouse where Doyle cut his mainland performing teeth during those early Great Big Sea shows at the Lower Deck in 1993.
“Greetings, Halifax, Nova Scotia! My name’s Alan Doyle and I’m from Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, and we’re going to love tonight. Oh yes, we are...” he said with a wink as the band struck up We’re Gonna Love Tonight, the single from 2020’s Rough Side Out, released just before COVID-19 pulled the rug out from under the music business.
There was a certain gusto about it onstage, as if love interrupted had finally been put back into place.
Occasionally, there was a certain rustiness about the show that only added to its charm, as Doyle and the Beautiful Beautiful Band worked the oil into the hinges.
Beginning a familiar GBS refrain with “I am the fountain of affection, I’m the instrument of joy,” Doyle stopped mid-verse with a cackle, suggesting it might be too early to make that declaration. But seconds later, the band was back to full steam on When I’m Up (I Can’t Get Down) accompanied by the crowd’s “spectacular distanced singing” to one of the most undeniable earworms known to the East Coast.
The singer was in fine self-deprecating form between songs, joking that he had to grease up his legs to get into the stage clothes last worn in March, before he “went deep into the COVID sandwich hunt”, and shrugging off the handful of groans that greeted his suggestion that he’d become “Alan Lloyd Webber” while writing a new musical for the Charlottetown Festival with Newfoundland songwriter Rachel Cousins.
“It’s been a while!,” he admonished the crowd. “Not every gag is going to be a winner.”
Mostly, there was a certain sweetness in the interaction between the frontman and his bandmates, picking up right where they left off eight months ago. “It’s a special night, so we’re going to dance for you,” declared Doyle during the gentle When the Nightingale Sings, doing a bit of arm’s-length waltzing with Carson and Kirby.
“They told us beforehand there was no dancing allowed, so we prepared that extensive bit of choreography just for you,” he grinned before demonstrating moves from small-town Newfoundland he and guitarist Cory Tetford know all too well, like the Petty Harbour Kodiak Step and the St. Phillip’s Overbite.
One of the finest guitarists to come out of Grand Falls, or anywhere else for that matter, Tetford was a secret weapon employed strategically throughout the night, giving the show an electric edge that would have been unthinkable in a Great Big Sea set. He raised the bar on Sea of No Cares with a tight, sleek solo, and added some raunchy honky tonk to the unofficial Newfoundland anthem Lukey that Doyle noted made it sound strangely sexy for the first time in its decades-long history.
Another island anthem came to mind when Doyle described his first trip to Nashville at pal Gordie Sampson’s invitation to pitch songs to country stars — “Carrie Underwood turned down What’re Ya At?” — and he heard a cover of Ron Hynes’ Sonny’s Dream in a local bar.
The bittersweet mix of homesickness and hopefulness led to some inspired turns of phrase on Tennessee Whiskey and a Newfoundland Song, a new track from the upcoming EP Songs From Home (out Nov. 13) that carries Hynes’ influence in spades, although at this point that could be said of just about any modern folk song written on the East Coast in the last few decades.
Singing a song concocted in a tavern led Doyle to notice that the table arrangements in the convention centre’s basement ballroom reminded him somewhat of the aforementioned Lower Deck, at which point an audience member called out, “Sociable!”
As quick on his feet as he is with the beat, drummer Kris MacFarlane hollered back, “Sociable distancing!” cracking up everyone on stage and leading the singer to hoist a can and warn the crowd, “but only say it in a calm and non-excited manner.”
Fat chance of that at this point in the night.
Especially as Doyle and the Beautiful Beautiful Band shifted into top gear for the home stretch, mirroring the celebrants' thoughts with Rough Side Out’s We Don’t Wanna Go Home and going for broke with a weirdly COVID-19-appropriate GBS medley of Consequence Free, R.E.M.’s It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) and The Night Paddy Murphy Died.
The latter song saw one of the highest incidents of chair dancing of the night, and although drinks were being served, no one broke with decorum and tried to two-step in the aisle, which I’m sure was much appreciated by the staff who were trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible during the course of the show.
Obviously, playing to crowds of 200 people seated at well-spaced tables at a premium price is a far cry from gathering five times that many in a venue like Casino Nova Scotia’s Schooner Showroom or the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, and who even knows when a major Canadian or international headliner might be able to pack Scotiabank Centre again.
But this is the hand COVID-19 has dealt us for now, and for those who came to see Alan Doyle on Friday night it was worth a little extra trouble to experience the joy and spontaneity of a proper concert presentation for the first time in months and months.
