Recall, if you can bear it, a time when duff pop hulks like Westlife, Blue and Daniel Bedingfield ruled the pop charts.
This was the year of 2002, and that was when James Yorkston, a Fife singer-songwriter with Fence connections, quietly issued one of the decade's greatest albums in Moving Up Country.
Ten years on from that Domino Records debut, the hit parade flagellates folk as standard – Mumford and Sons flog millions; Ed Sheeran bags Brit Awards – yet still there is no-one like Yorkston. His visceral song-craft, East Neuk sign-posting and wry humour is worth100 Mumfords, and this is why Moving Up Country's re-release, and supporting tour, felt timely and welcome.
Yorkston's solo, stripped-back rendition of his landmark album highlighted how beautifully these songs have weathered, including the lover's leap of Sweet Jesus, the (cautiously) optimistic swoon of St Patrick, and the glorious amble of Moving Up Country, Roaring The Gospel ("Careful girl, you'll give it all away").
His storytelling is vivid in song and comical on-stage – the latter culminated in an improvised Jubilee-inspired yarn about the Queen, her boats and her Old Firm allegiance – while his guitar playing is hair-raising, as evinced on a fired-up encore of 2008's arresting booze-rebuke, Temptation.
A rare Peel Session track provided another encore in La Magnifica, which served to underscore the poetry in Yorkston's hymns – "To move, like a wreck, to the Neuk" – and to barb the pretenders who sequester the pop throne, but not our emotions. "You can't manufacture love, build a flutter out of paper, hoodwink my heart," he sang. Yorkston is the real thing. Lang may he roar.
HHHH
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