An Angel, Twenty Years Later

Growing up is supposed to come with certain freedoms. One of them, in theory, is shedding the embarrassing enthusiasms of your youth—the things you loved before you developed taste, before you understood what was cool and what was hopelessly, irredeemably not. The Kelly Family were hopelessly not, by the time I was old enough to know what that meant. I loved them anyway.

The Kelly Family—an Irish-American family of traveling musicians who became one of the biggest acts in 1990s Europe, selling out arenas across Germany on the strength of songs like An Angel and a genuinely chaotic stage energy—announced in late 2016 that they were reuniting for a concert the following May. The venue was the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund, which was pointed: it’s where they’d played at the height of their success, twenty years earlier.

Angelo Kelly said the conversation had started in 2014, when the anniversary surfaced and the family began talking seriously about doing it again. We started talking intensively about whether we wanted to stand on stage together again, he explained, to celebrate everything we achieved as a family, together with our fans. Patricia Kelly was more direct: For me it’s a dream come true. All these years I hoped and prayed to make music with my siblings again.

I had been a real Kelly Family fan—the kind who knew every word, who had strong opinions about which sibling was the best one. Patricia was always mine, for what it’s worth: there was a warmth in how she performed that the others didn’t quite have. The NES had just come back. The Tamagotchi had come back. Retronostalgia devours everything eventually, and I had no defenses left by the time the Kellys announced theirs.

They played Dortmund in May 2017. By all accounts it was exactly what it was supposed to be: massive, sentimental, completely earnest, and full of people who had apparently never stopped knowing every word. Some guilts are lighter than others.