Glen Hansard at Roundhouse

Glen Hansard at Roundhouse, London — 2026-05-23

Glen Hansard brought his Don’t Settle era to the Roundhouse with a set that felt messy, loud, strange and far more alive than a nostalgic greatest-hits show.

Few artists carry their history onstage as heavily as Glen Hansard. Across The Frames, The Swell Season and an increasingly unpredictable solo career, his songs have always sounded like they were still evolving long after being recorded. This current Don’t Settle era, built around live reinterpretations pulled from across his catalogue, feels like Hansard dragging his entire history back into the room and holding it up to the light. At the Roundhouse, he did not perform a nostalgic greatest-hits set. He staged something messier, louder, stranger and far more alive than that.

Songs that once felt intimate and weathered on record arrived here with the force of a revival meeting and the volatility of a garage band barely holding the whole thing together. Nothing about the set felt preserved for nostalgia’s sake. Everything still felt alive, unpredictable and slightly at risk of coming apart.

He opened with “Revelate”, and immediately the Roundhouse became a pressure chamber. The circular room suited him perfectly. Every shouted refrain ricocheted back from the walls like the audience was feeding the songs back into existence in real time.

The material from Don’t Settle (Vol. 1 – Transmissions East) already sounds fully lived in. The title track arrived early and set the emotional blueprint for the night. Restless, searching, unwilling to settle into easy nostalgia. Hansard has reached the age where many artists become caretakers of their own mythology. Instead, he seems intent on tearing back through it.

“I’ll Be You, Be Me” and “Say It to Me Now” carried that strange contradiction that defines him live. Pub-floor intimacy scaled up to near-cathedral size. One minute he was muttering lines like a man figuring them out in real time, the next, he was detonating into full-throated howls that sounded closer to hardcore than folk.

That tension snapped fully into place during “Great Weight”. Before the song, Hansard grinned while swapping guitars and said, “I know what you’re thinking… something cool is coming.” Nothing flashy arrived. Instead, the band dropped into this heavy, slow-moving version of the song that pulled the whole room back into silence almost immediately. Typical Hansard move. Sidestep the obvious moment, then land somewhere better.

“Fitzcarraldo” became one of the night’s emotional centrepieces. Hansard gave the song an even stranger sense of scale before the band tore into it. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s obsessive 1982 film of the same name, the song has always carried a feeling of impossible pursuit and blind belief. Live, it felt bruised and volcanic, the The Frames classic still pushing forward with the same ragged intensity decades later.

Then came “Down on Our Knees”, which Hansard explained began as a line from a dream, standing on a balcony after a show in Berlin alongside the late Rowland S. Howard, watching a surreal flood carry bodies, furniture, Joseph Beuys’s hat and Klaus Kinski’s white suit through the city below. In the dream, Howard turned to him and said, “we’ll all go down on our knees eventually.” Hansard woke up, recorded the line into his phone, and the song was born. It unfolded like some post-apocalyptic folk sermon. Hypnotic, droning, almost industrial in places. The repetition became oppressive in the best possible way, the band locking into a pulse that felt capable of shaking the old Roundhouse beams loose.

And then Hansard did the least expected thing of the night. He launched into a cover of Discharge’s “Drunk With Power”.

Not ironic. Not novelty. Full commitment.

It was feral.

Hansard’s voice stopped sounding weathered and started sounding weaponised, scraping itself raw against the song’s aggression. For a few minutes, the gig mutated entirely, folk dissolving into pure confrontational noise. It was a reminder that underneath all the spiritual earnestness and busker-poet mythology, there has always been something punk in him.

Of course, “Falling Slowly” arrived to deafening recognition, but interestingly, it no longer felt like the emotional climax of the night. Hansard has finally managed something difficult. Reclaiming his catalogue from the shadow of Once. The song still landed beautifully, but it existed as part of the wider story now rather than the defining chapter.

That wider story found its true ending with “Bird of Sorrow”.

Before playing it, Hansard told the audience about hearing of his mother’s death while in France, rushing back to Ireland on a ferry through an eerily calm sea. He described spotting a seagull seemingly guiding the boat the whole journey and convincing himself, in that grief-struck state, that somehow it might be her. Then, putting his arm around someone and saying “there she is”, the bird immediately shat on him

The entire room collapsed into laughter.

And that is exactly why Hansard remains such a compelling live performer. He never lets a moment become too heavy or overly sentimental. The punchline did not undercut “Bird of Sorrow”. If anything, it made the song hit harder afterwards. Suddenly it felt less like a grand statement about grief and more like something messy, human and real.

The encore pushed the room into full communal release. Courtney Marie Andrews joined him for “Let the Good One Go”, tender without slipping into fragility, before “Bearing Witness” and “When Your Mind’s Made Up” turned the Roundhouse into one giant choir.

By the end, Hansard looked less like a man revisiting his past than someone still trying to understand it in public.

That is what makes this Don’t Settle phase so compelling. These songs are not being preserved behind glass or replayed out of obligation. They are still moving, still changing shape, still capable of surprising both the audience and, at times, seemingly Hansard himself.

Setlist

Revelate / Don’t Settle / I’ll Be You, Be Me / Say It to Me Now / Gold / My Little Ruin / Didn’t He Ramble / Grace Beneath the Pines / Her Mercy / This Gift / Something Right / Great Weight / Fitzcarraldo / Down on Our Knees / Drunk With Power (Discharge cover) / Falling Slowly / Bird of Sorrow

Encore

Let the Good One Go (Courtney Marie Andrews cover, with Courtney Marie Andrews) / Bearing Witness / When Your Mind’s Made Up

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