“DO you want to see the a***?”

There are some questions that you might not expect to hear from the stage if you go to see Harry Styles or Beyonce. But then they’re not playing Stirling’s Tolbooth on a Sunday night in April. And they’re not Pictish Trail.

Eigg’s “sexiest man” (he doesn’t quite say as much but he leaves the implication hanging) is asking us if we want to see the posterior view of his new trews. The reason? They’ve got the cover image of his latest album Island Family. We do and as his band plays suitably louche accompaniment, he turns and waggles it in the face of a smallish but enthusiastic audience. Beyonce would probably admire his moves, come to think of it.

The last gig of his Covid-delayed tour (two years in the waiting) is a joyous reminder of what we’ve missed. Pictish Trail, aka Johnny Lynch, remains glorious company, whether he’s telling you of his escape from near death under the wheels or a logging truck, smacking his stomach with a tambourine, jumping into the audience for a ceilidh while his band maintain a hypnotic motorik groove onstage, or just using that wonderful voice of his to pin you to the ground.

The last time I caught him in this venue Lynch was still in his Fence Records days when he was a nu-folky balladeer of sorts (and a very good one).

And that, after a couple of technical gremlins, is how he initially presents himself here. But after a couple of numbers, band members begin to join him on stage and soon the four-piece are making a wild noise, all thumping drums, basslines, guitars and electronic noise. Drawing heavily on the new album and last year’s Thumb World, the result is all throb and yearn, part psych-pop, part wig-out, full of shifting time signatures and accompanying dance moves. With a few punchlines thrown in between tunes.

And yet at heart he remains, as he always was, a songwriter engaged with matters of the heart (a friend, Lynch tells us, says he sings about “male pain,” much to his amusement) and the world around him.

It’s just that he is dressing it up a little differently these days. Starting with those trousers.