Suzzy Roche and Lucy Wainwright Roche, 4 stars out of 5
Oran Mor, Glasgow, Rob Adams
You almost don’t need the songs with Suzzy Roche and her daughter, Lucy. Between Lucy’s observations about the idiosyncratically named junior members of her extended family and Suzzy’s very individual take on just about everything, the between-song entertainment is exactly that, except with added charm.
Roche mère’s tale of driving on the wrong side of the road and sending two motorbikes into the air and towards the scrap yard (the riders were okay) was just one of the unlikely sources of gentle humour in ninety minutes or so of mother-daughter verbal baton passing.
When the songs come, the charm quotient actually rises. If there’s something special about siblings harmonising, then a mother and daughter singing and playing guitars together can be just as potent, especially when – as here – the songs are sung as naturally as they might be round the kitchen table.
Both women write, often with the same off-beat, informal style of their stories and interaction with the audience, capturing the art or otherwise of songwriting and the mysteries of relationships and revealing the sort of dark lullabies that are required to appease the youngest, and possibly the most precocious so far, Wainwrights.
Covers of Paul McCartney’s For No One, Paul Simon’s America and Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now accentuated the domestic warmth of their harmonising and a cross generational appreciation of classic songs while Everyone Wants to Be Loved was a genuinely moving tribute to its author, Rob Morsberger, once a prominent figure on the Edinburgh jazz scene, who oversaw the duo’s Fairytale and Myth album as his final creative act after he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
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