Magners Summer Nights
Roddy Frame
Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow
Stuart Morrison
Five Stars
‘I was sceptical’ Roddy Frame explained, regarding his initial reaction to playing the Kelvingrove Bandstand. ‘I thought I would need a band’. Well, if ever there was a gig to underline the power of acoustic guitar and voice, this was it.
The former Aztec Camera front man had attracted a sell out crowd to the second night of this year’s Magners Summer Nights Festival and he strolled onstage with a confidence which turned out to be entirely justifiable as he promised an evening of Aztec Camera and solo songs. Under a glorious and miraculously clear sky, he gently eased into the evening with Small World, from his 2002 album Surf. From then on it was, quite literally, a stroll in the park.
He told us that he had put the set together without thinking too much about it and that it had been influenced by locations linked to the songs, although as he put it, he didn’t want it to sound like a musical version of Whicker’s World. And so it was that we were taken from Winchester, the inspiration for Aztec Camera’s Black Lucia, to Killermont Street, his paen to catching a bus home to East Kilbride from Glasgow city centre. The crowd knew every word of every song and he rapidly developed a horde of adoring fans at the front of the stage, who eventually had to be admonished for being almost too loud.
There were too many highlights to list here, but Bigger, Better, Brighter, examined his flirtation with fame, whilst Oblivious and set closer, the outstanding Somewhere In My Heart, explained why he achieved that fame in the first place.
A triumph from start to finish.
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