The lead track from Keeley’s forthcoming second album ‘Beautiful Mysterious’, ‘Inga Hauser’ continues her determined and singular campaign to publicise a historic but little-known crime. Like all her musical output, the song is concerned with the murder of teenage German backpacker Inga Hauser in Northern Ireland some time after disembarkation from a Stranraer-Larne ferry in 1988.
Starting with a beautifully spindly guitar line which mutates into a slightly Marr-esque series of riffs, Keeley and her band members just ooze melody. Her slightly Irish-accented lilt is quite far back in the mix but devastatingly effective – “are you going to Belfast?”… “did you even get one happy minute to breathe the Irish air?”…
This would be a difficult subject for any writer to do justice to in a song, let alone their entire recorded output, but Dublin native Keeley has again produced deft music and lyrics that elevate the subject matter into as much a celebration as a plea for remembrance and justice (the perpetrators of this crime are known but have never been tried).