No offence meant to my fellow punters on Sunday evening, but Maggie Reilly and Stuart MacKillop, of Glasgow's fine funk outfit Cado Belle, have worn better than many of their fans.
Joined by former Silencers drummer Tony Soave and two younger players, guitarist David Dunsmuir and bassist Ross Hamilton, who are happy in both the jazz and trad arenas, the singer and keyboard player treated a packed theatre to a survey of almost 40 years of music-making while suggesting their best may be yet to come.
With lyricist Alasdair Robertson in the audience to hear it, the closing track from the 1970s band's sole album, Stone's Throw From Nowhere, was enough to satisfy those who still cherish the disc.
Her biggest solo hit, Eveytime We Touch, also got an airing, as did two songs from her 1980s partnership with Mike Oldfield, To France and – of course – Moonlight Shadow.
While there was nothing perfunctory about any of this, it was the newer songs that really stood out in the set. Heaven Sent, a declared favourite of the younger segment of the group, is as fine a slice of pop-soul as the Average White Band came up with in their heyday, and Reilly and MacKillop's excursion into musical theatre should be worth seeing if the sample song played here, Not My Father's Son, is any guide.
The other new songs added Herald Angel-winning fiddler Duncan Chisholm to the line-up and suggested the forthcoming album will be a real progression on 2006's Rowan in its amalgam of trad ingredients with contemporary soul-infected songwriting – helped by the fact that this group line-up may be the best to serve the Reilly tonsils since 1976.
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