Spree Festival

Idlewild & RSNO, Paisley Abbey

Keith Bruce

four stars

If a particularly lovely Spiegeltent in front of Gilmour Street station has seen more gigs as part of The Spree in 2015, there is no doubt that the annual meeting of the RSNO with musicians from alternative disciplines under the baton of arranger John Logan has become the event’s most eagerly anticipated highlight.

Following in the footsteps of King Creosote, Admiral Fallow and The Twilight Sad, this year’s choice, the revived and reborn Idlewild, presented Logan with more of a challenge. Unlike all of the previous combos, Idlewild are unarguably a rock band, with their roots in the chart triumph of indie at the turn of the millennium. So balance was a problem when guitarist Rod Jones cranked up the volume, and there were times when the efforts of the orchestral musicians were less audible than one might have hoped.

But they were few, and if it was the price of the fun of hearing early classics like Film For the Future and Captain, then so be it, because this was a set that ran the gamut from the band’s first releases through to Come On Ghost and Collect Yourself, which opened the set, from the new album, Everything Ever Written, and took in the hits, You Held The World in Your Arms, Love Steals Us From Loneliness and American English along the way.

With Andrew Mitchell and fiddler Hannah Fisher on board, the current Idlewild is a subtler and more harmonious outfit than its earliest incarnation, and the strings and brass of the orchestra were fine additions to those tunes. But what was most impressive was the range of the compositions they brought to the collaboration. A real showcase concert.

Picture: Brian Grierson