Celtic Connections
Rickie Lee Jones
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
The Celtic gods weren’t favouring Rickie Lee Jones. Whether they were telling her to, let’s paraphrase, “Go away, you don’t belong on this festival” is another matter. No festival is more inclusive than Celtic Connections and at least one of Jones’ malfunctions – forgetting to depress a footswitch – was her own fault.
A prima donna might have walked off and not returned after those two, apparently damned, opening songs. Jones, however, is a trooper (in more ways than one) and the more things went wrong, the more entertaining she became. Her second attempt at starting the gig, at the piano instead of on her misbehaving guitar, was a sublime We Belong Together and her second try at Weasel and the White Boys Cool gave us another chance to luxuriate in that delicious shuffle groove.
With a band that she apparently picked up in Canada but sounded more like it dropped in from Rickie Lee Jones heaven, much of what followed, including a David Bowie tribute in Rebel Rebel, was sublime too, sung in a voice that’s both vulnerable and as fearless as her taste for melodic adventure.
She never was going to rattle out cloned hits to order following her early success with Chuck E’s in Love. She’s a wayward talent, as far as the mainstream’s concerned, but her songwriting has craft in abundance and whole movie scripts in its narratives. Living it Up could have been written by Burt Bacharach or Brian Wilson and newer songs such as J’ai Connais Pas find her responding to her new home in New Orleans with fabulous observation and real feeling for the city’s musical temperature.
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