Glasgow Americana Tom Russell
St Andrews in the Square, Glasgow
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Tom Russell didn’t actually ride onto the stage in Stetson and chaps, firing a Colt 45 in each hand. For one thing, he’d left his cowboy hat in a Nottingham hotel. The man credited with co-founding, with Californian gun-shooter Dave Alvin, the strain of music that Glasgow Americana celebrates did give every impression, however, of arriving in town, let loose from the trail for a Friday night of rip-roarin’ ebullience.
Russell recently released what will surely come to be seen as his magnum opus, The Rose of Roscrae, an epic 52-track odyssey whose cast would take an old-fashioned Hollywood budget to assemble in person and whose storyline deserves to be captured on film.
Squeezing its essence into the equivalent of an EP for the first half meant much summarising. But Russell and his excellent sidekick, fellow guitarist Max de Barnardi conveyed its narrative of an Irish boy forced to leave his first love, making the American West his new home and pining for the old one with typically rugged singing, entertaining asides, wolf impersonations, historical observations and no little enthusiasm-cum-marketing for the full version and book available at the back of the room.
There might have been a case for Russell devoting the whole evening to “The Rose”. He does, though, have a voluminous back catalogue and the second half presented the greatest hits (or some of them) with de Barnardi slipping in a superb finger-picked instrumental and Donald Trump starring as the absent target. Tough, poetic realism is Russell’s stock in trade and Stealing Electricity, California Snow and the Trump trumper, Who’s Gonna Build the Wall delivered with gusto.
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