Womad

Andy White

If you lined up every male songwriter who’d been saddled with the lazy ‘He’s the new Bob Dylan’ epithet, you’d have a queue stretching around the block. Bruce Springsteen would be at the front, closely followed by the likes of Loudon Wainwright and John Prine. Even Eminem would be there. And, representing the Belfast singer-songwriter faction, you’d also find Andy White. It was the mid-1980s when the comparison with Minnesota’s Most Famous tried to strangle this young Belfast man, but Andy shrugged it off, revealing his own very personal world-view through a series of charming, wistful records. Now based in Melbourne (bringing him closer to sometime collaborator Tim Finn), Andy’s always been unafraid to mix love and politics in his songs and his work carries the marks of both innocence and experience, as suggested by the title of his most recent album, Boy 40. An old friend of WOMAD, this year’s Rivermead performance finds him in the company of Croatian accordionist/pianist Radoslav Lorkovic, whose influences include everything from classical to blues via country, jazz and soul. The pairing of these guys promises great songs, intuitive playing and no small amount of creativity. These days, that’s more than you can get out of the old Bob Dylan.