Johnny Flynn may be less than half way through his twenties but he sounds more than twice that - the kind of man you imagine has been trekking from one folk festival to another since before you were born, wearing sweaters woven from bits of wool he found caught on barbed wire along the way, mixed with stray bits of beard escaping from his chin.
He takes pride in distancing himself from the 'flimsy' singer-songwriters around him and while his tunes are certainly more upbeat than the Smogs and Bright Eyes of this world, he also lacks the edge of such acts, producing music which, while more traditionally folky, is also no more than that.
In fact, his claim to be 'Nick Drake fronting The Pogues at the Underage Festival' is more accurate than he might have intended. The only way you'd get a suicidal recluse and the world's most inebriated Irishmen at a booze-free event for junior accountants is to strip away everything that makes them interesting.
If you're not one of the people who spent your youth trying to get into the over 18s nightclub, and instead trotted happily along to the church disco pleased that those noisy bigger boys were being kept outside, you and Johnny Flynn deserve each other. For the rest of us, there's plenty of rock'n'roll to go round.
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