Saint Etienne, Young Fathers and Belle and Sebastian. Glasgow gigs , May 2015

Glasgow Gig Reviews - May 2015 

Saint Etienne, Glasgow Film Theatre. Young Fathers, Glasgow School of Art. Belle and Sebastian, SSE Hydro

Rather spoiled for choice for live music in Glasgow this week. Here are a couple of brief live gig reviews of some of the bands that I took in.

It is a real treat to see Saint Etienne and Belle and Sebastian play within a few days of each other, two standards on any playlist I would put together in my student days. Both bands demonstrate their "indie" credentials by being named respectively after a French football team and a French children's book of the 1960s. Between these two gigs I also this week got the chance to see the excellent Young Fathers again, who seemed like a sharp, refreshing double espresso between two sweet cups of cappuccino.

Saint Etienne

I have always kept an eye out for Saint-Étienne the French Ligue 1 football team ever since they played a European Cup Final in Glasgow in 1976. I was only a wee thing, but my parents put me up to speaking to some of the 25,000 French fans in town, chanting "Allez Les Verts!" to them. Despite my support, Bayern Munich (and Hampden's square goalposts) beat them 1-0 that day. When a band of that name emerged in the 1990s I was drawn to them by the name, and stuck around to listen to their groovy, indie-dance sound. They were in Glasgow to perform live the soundtrack to the film "How We Used To Live", a documentary edited together by one time band member Paul Kelly, largely from BFI archive footage. (If you want to gaze through the archive yourself you can do so along at Bridgeton Olympia Library in Glasgow.)

There is a lot more interest in the nostalgia days before every aspect of our lives was recorded and shared with the world, but I found the film itself a bit sentimental. It recalled London from the 1950s to the early 1980s with Ian McShane's jocular narration. There were interesting wee nuggets, a well dressed woman tottering in high heels through a demolition site, steam trains being dismantled during the Beeching cuts, but the music and pictures were creating an atmosphere, rather than telling a story. It all felt a bit clean and wholesome. I think we've just been spoiled a bit with King Creosote doing a similar thing alongside Virginia Heath with their film From Scotland With Love. That film, made from Scottish film archives, seems to much more successfully capture real people and real places, with no cod narrator, but the music providing a strong element of storytelling.

Saint Etienne at Glasgow Film Theatre

This was followed by the band, fronted by Sarah Cracknell playing a fair few from their back catalogue. Great though their tunes are, it was funny to hear songs that I used to dance along to in Level 8, whilst sitting in a comfy seat in a cinema watching the band play on the carpeted area below us. It was a bit too much for one or two middle aged male groupies who squealed nonsensically at Sarah Cracknell, who didn't have the height a stage would usually give to allow her to be kept away from them. I cringed on her behalf as she politely tolerated it. Their tunes have stood the test of time however and were great to see performed.

Young Fathers

Edinburgh's finest pop/rock/hip hop act, Young Fathers arrived back on these shores again after a recent tour in the USA. Their latest album, White Men Are Black Men Too, is a fantastic listen, but seen live they take it up a notch. The surprise, but deserved winners of the Mercury Music prize last year their music is as hard to categorise as they are. A mish-mash of influences is what you should expect from a band consisting from a boy Drylaw, a Liberian who arrived in Edinburgh via Ghana and a Edinburgh-born son of Nigerian parents. Their "Young Fathers" moniker apparently comes from the fact that they all share their father's first name, a clever play on words that their songs enjoy too. They are angry, sweaty and have got something worth listening to. Driven on by their energetic drummer they barely pause for breath. I think this is the third time that I've seen them live, and in the sold out hall at the Art School in Glasgow they now seem to have a following that knows their music, and wants to singalong. They battered through a slick, well rehearsed set, dropped the mic to the stage, then walked off. No chit chat, no laughs, it's all about the music. 

Young Fathers on stage in Glasgow

Belle and Sebastian

By contrast to Young Fathers, Belle and Sebastian have never been about the energy levels, but more about the feeling of a shy friend talking about his life from his bedroom. The first time that I saw them live was in 1998 when they played in Maryhill Community Central Halls, a kind of warm up gig for a tour I think. It was an easy crowd, with their most adoring fans sat cross legged on the floor near the stage, and their aunties and uncles nearer the back of the hall. At that gig, occasionally they'd stop when one of the band made a mistake, they'd all apologise to each other politely and decide what song to play instead.

Next time I saw them was a few years later when they played the Barrowlands, a venue that suited them down  to the ground, packed out with adoring fans. The intimacy of their music worked well in that space, with local couthiness supplied by Gavin Mitchell coming onstage to do his Boaby the barman routine from Still Game.

Now on the home leg of their current tour they are playing the 10,000 seater SSE Hydro on a Friday night, accompanied by the Scottish Festival Orchestra. Their current album, Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance, takes them in a different direction, as if they have been listening to a lot of Pet Shop Boys music recently, hinting at a grander sound and performance. Like Saint Etienne, we start off with a nostalgic film as the hall is beginning to fill. The film, Glasgow 1980, is worth watching if you've never seen it. It was commissioned by Glasgow Corporation in 1971 like a propaganda film, looking forward to the brave new world ahead once all the slum tenements were cleared and we were all living in clean, airy tower blocks and getting about on motorways. It is directed by renowned photographer Oscar Mazaroli and produced by Bill Forsyth and can be watched on the Scottish Screen Archive website.

Belle and Sebastian at the SSE Hydro, Glasgow

The Hydro is a massive space which the band and their orchestra tried to fill with bombast, flashy video screens and enthusiasm. It was good to see Mick Cooke back with the band, as one thing that I missed on the current album was his brass playing. He seemed to have come back to help with the musical arraignments with the orchestra. They played surprisingly few songs from the new album, sticking to reliable old favourites. Sadly no room on the setlist for my own favourites (Fox in the Snow and The Stars of Track and Field) but The Boy With the Arab Strap was accompanied by audience and orchestra members invited onstage to dance. I really enjoyed the concert, sat with a smile on my face the whole way through, but 100-times over would have preferred to see them back in the Barrowlands. The vast standing area seemed to be filled with many people just standing, so I don't know what the sound or atmosphere down there was like, but it looked a bit flatter than you may have hoped. The best moments tended to be when you got some intimacy with the band, talking about writing Dear Catastrophe Waitress in the old Grosvenor Cafe, or another song on the number 44 bus (which used to take me home to Knightswood from the city centre - a bus route that seemed to attract eccentric passengers such as the woman who would sit her tortoise on her shoulder "as it likes to look out the window").

It was a great concert, they have a fantastic back catalogue of songs, but I am not sure they really should try to be a stadium rock band.

Happy Birthday Woody Guthrie, by Billy Bragg

What's not to like about a concert that sells itself as "Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall Celebrate Woody Guthrie's Centenary"?

This sold out show took place at the ABC in Glasgow as part of the No Mean City festival 'celebrating Americana' and was one of a short series of concerts Billy Bragg is playing around the UK to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967 of the inherited condition Huntington's Disease. Bragg has recorded and written music for numerous previously unheard Woody Guthrie songs before.  The recordings that Billy Bragg made with Wilco, The Mermaid Avenue Project, came about after Woody Guthrie's daughter gave him access to many of Guthrie's archives and unrecorded lyrics and if you haven't heard this stuff it is well worth listening to. He said in an interview with the Scotland on Sunday that turning up a song Woody Guthrie wrote about the River Clyde, after his brief time in Glasgow whilst a merchant seaman during World War 2, inspired him to play one of these gigs in the city.

As a child, in the days when family parties involved my auntie Carol singing "The Crystal Chandalier" or my great-uncle Andy singing "I Had Only Half a Crown", I took my turn by either singing "Who Will Buy?" from Oliver or "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie. Afterwards I guess I came to his other songs through listening to Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen before I finally gave in and bought some CDs of his crackly old recordings and read about his remarkable life. The point Guthrie's daughter Nora is making is that there was more to him than just this one iconic song and that is really the idea behind the Mermaid Avenue Project and this gig, so it wasn't all Tom Joad and This Land Is Your Land tonight.

I've seen Billy Bragg play before, most memorably in a great concert with Dick Gaughan, so I was hoping to hear tales, facts, diatribes and anecdotes as much as music and thankfully he spent as much time talking as singing, which was just what I was after.

Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall

He started by duetting with KT Tunstall on a Woody Guthrie song, before leaving the stage to her to play some of her own new material and a couple of her oldies, all in Woody Guthrie style, one voice and an acoustic guitar. She has a great voice and although she described her new stuff as "less perky and all about death" such as "Carried" she can also do angry. I hadn't realised that "Poison In Your Cup" was written after seeing the look on George W Bush's face leaving office. Also one of her new songs gave her the opportunity to display her fine whistling skills. (cf Andrew Bird)

After they managed some fantastic harmonising together on "Deportees" (I know, harmonising with Billy Bragg's voice) the stage was left to Billy to take us through some of the songs he wrote, at times with Wilco, to Woody's lyrics. The songs were diverse, from one double entendre filled song about Ingrid Bergman which let him shoehorn in a topical joke about the Duchess of Cambridge, to union songs such as "I Guess I Planted". One stand out song was "Slipknot" and all accompanied by acoustic guitar or his new Gretsch guitar which he lovingly stroked.

He then sung a song Woody Guthrie penned on leaving Glasgow on board ship heading back to America, "Scotch Hills". This being the song's first outing Billy had re-wrote the tune for it at rehearsals this afternoon, and had to remind himself of the final tune from his iPhone recording from the afternoon (the same device I made this crackling recording on - sorry for the quality). Very weird hearing a Woody Guthrie song about "farewell to old Glasgow". Wow, he really didn't just bum about in the Dustbowl.



For an encore he raised the biggest cheer of the night singing "Scousers Never Buy The Sun" from his excellent Fight Songs CD, very topical with the Hillsborough Enquiry published earlier this week, before giving us an updated version of "The Great Leap Forward" - so updated it proposed it was "time to give Craig Levine the sack" and to "Free Pussy Riot", surely the first time one song has combined such disparate wishes. For a grand finale KT Tunstall was back as they sang a Scottish version of "This Land Is Your Land" she had penned today. Singing "From Caledonia, to the Western Islands, from the pinewood forests to the Gulf Stream Waters" worked remarkably well. She even managed to get Tunnocks tea cakes and Irn Bru into it - what a talent!

Andrew Bird vs Olympic Torch

After debating what to do on a Friday night in Glasgow I plumped for the Andrew Bird gig at the Old Fruitmarket. Momus appearing at the CCA also appealed to me, but I had seen Andrew Bird a few years ago at the short lived "Indian Summer" festival in Victoria Park and have been buying his music ever since, so was keen to see him performing from the excellent new album, Break It Yourself. There were plenty of other options too - the Olympic Torch evening party in George Square or even the first matches of Euro2012. I decided there'd be plenty of football to see over the next couple of weeks, and sent my children along to George Square with granny and grandad.

My son had got tickets for the Coca-Cola/ Panasonic/ Samsung/ Bank of Scotland Olympic Torch evening show in George Square. However I thought I'd take in Andrew Bird rather than Eliza Doolittle, Emili Sande, generalfiasco and "Bigg Taj" welcoming in that ancient symbol of the Olympic Games as the torch arrives in Glasgow on its way around the country. Luckily the Glasgow weather didn't manage to extinguish the flame and stayed dry. My 12 year old's summary of the George Square show - "the choice of food was pretty rubbish, Emili Sande's first two songs were rubbish but her next two were actually really good, the Provost was boring but it was great when the torch arrived and it was right beside us." They also brought home a fine collection of the sponsors tat. As the Olympic relay was devised in Nazi Germany for the 1936 Olympics and their torch made by the Krupp armaments company, I guess it is vaguely appropriate that the symbolism is now subservient to the corporate sponsors.

Topically enough the Olympic Flame is meant to symbolise the fire that Prometheus stole from the Greek gods to give to man. I had seen the film of that name the other night, and have to say that it felt like I sat through a 2 hour version of the trailer (which is infuriatingly full of terrible spoilers), the whole film a trailer for the next film of what is obviously planned as an ongoing franchise of a money-making machine. All the loose ends just cry out "Now come and see the prequel-sequel". Frustrating. It is best if viewed as a brand new sci-fi film, and just enjoyed as such as there are some good set pieces and Noomi Rapace is always watchable.

Famous whistling musicians

1. Roger Whittaker
2. Bryan Ferry in Jealous Guy
3. Otis Redding in Dock of the Bay
4. Andrew Bird
5. ....eh, that's about it

Andrew Bird is a multi-instrumentalist/singer/songwriter-type who plays the violin beautifully, whilst singing, whistling and clapping along. Although one woman in the audience had brought her knitting along with her it wasn't all beard-strokers and was a pretty mixed crowd. His opening instrumental piece showed his virtuoso violin playing, and unique style. Whilst plucking and playing he can make it sound like a ukulele, a balalaika or bouzouki and Celtic or Cajun by turns. His trademark rotating gramophone speakers give a thrummimg background to some pieces whilst distracting me by narrowly avoiding smacking the head of a toy monkey each spin. Bird himself looks like David Tennant and Jeremey Hardy's missing sibling and his modest and quiet style means that songs often quietly fade away. Most of the set was from his current album but some old pieces are played with gumption such as "Effigy" and "Tables & Chairs". He tackled the fact he put his self-confessed "noisiest" song "Eyeoneye" in the middle, rather than at the end by following it up with a quirky rendition of Kermit the frog's "It Ain't Easy Being Green". His best section was when he played some "old style" stuff and Handsome Family songs around one microphone with fellow band members accompanying on acoustic guitar. This was well received, Glasgow audiences revealing their barely concealed affection for bluegrass and C&W music, and as a result he played again like this for one encore, which brought the audience to their feet and they demanded a further encore. The band deserve a mention too, excellent guitar and bass playing and a drummer appropriately looking like a Southern gas-pump attendant who should be spitting tobacco into his scraggy beard.

As everyone else at home had seen the Olympic Torch by now (my three children in George Square last night, and my wife when she was stuck in traffic coming home last night as the road was closed for it passing by her) I felt obliged to get up early this Saturday morning as it was again passing 100 yards from my front door. It is easy to be cynical in these days with so much corporate hustling of these events but I've always liked the Olympics and am looking forward to it this summer. I've got my tickets for the Mens football at Hampden and think Japan vs Spain will be a decent spectacle as Spain usually take it seriously and my kids will have their Japan strips on and flags out. I was strategically positioned at the car park above Waitrose at the top of Byres Road as I'd been warned that if you await the torch roadside it does rather whizz past you.

That was a good tip from my neighbour who'd stood on Byres Road last night to watch it on its first pass and I was able to take in the sponsors cavalcade before the torch arrived, and the torchbearer changeover took place just below me. Whilst she was waiting for it to arrive it was nice to see the next runner so clearly excited, as spectators took turns to get their photo taken with her and her torch.

Torchbearer handover on Byres Road

and onward with the Olympic Torch

There are more of my snaps of this momentous occasion here :- My Flickr feed