Big Big Country opened with a gratifyingly large turnout and a statement of the festival's intent from Annabel Lamb who, despite being ''a Sassenach with a father from Bearsden'', gave a listener-friendly impression of goings-on in houses with screen doors and streets buffeted by tumbleweed.
The audience had come to be mesmerised by Leo Kottke's guitar playing, though, and mesmerised they were. Having presumably been apprised by Billy Connolly of Glasgow's legendary calls of ''gie's 10 guitars'', Kottke neatly blitzed the likelihood of any such by coming on and sounding like 10 guitarists. The notes, sometimes seemingly impossible numbers of them, at other times, spare and direct, just seemed to flow as if a tap had been turned somewhere.
He can also tell a story, regaling us with episodes from the lives of octogenarian blues singers, their sad eating habits, and the lengths they'd go for a drink - with artistically tragic results. Paul Siebel's classic Louise was preceded by a similarly dark but humorous tale which in no way lessened the impact of the song.
The ability to mix dry mirth with intensely moving music, best illustrated by Across the Street, a chillingly elegant instrumental inspired by a man kept prisoner in Ljubliana in a house facing his family's flat without their knowledge, is one of Kottke's great assets.
That he managed to display it so well despite quite the most horrible sound quality says much for his professionalism.
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