Music
Ags Connolly, Admiral Bar, Glasgow
Rob Adams
THREE STARS
Ewan MacColl probably wouldn't have approved. MacColl, whose invaluable 1950s pioneering helped to shape the folk clubs that still proliferate today, including the one that co-hosted this gig, believed that singers should sing in their natural accents and Ags Connolly doesn't do that. Indeed, there's a temptation to think there might be two Ags Connollys, the one who introduces songs in a voice not a million miles away from English rugby player turned summariser Brian Moore's, and the one who sings country songs.
MacColl might even call him an impostor but that would be to ignore Connolly's obvious passion for his chosen genre. He may come from Oxfordshire but he has immersed himself so deeply in the hard line country music tradition that he'd pass for a Kentucky native. His songs are peopled by country characters, most of them terminally unlucky in love, and his voice, as strong in timbre as it is thick in adopted accent, can certainly project their woes with feeling.
The downbeat nature of his muse could easily become relentless but Connolly has a very English self-effacing humour. His chat is matey and the laughs are not slow in coming as he recounts his near-stalking of one of his heroes, Texan singer James Hand, before singing Hand's Over There, That's Frank with hard-won sincerity. Of course, deep down, Connolly might be the troubled soul he portrays. If so, he's turning an artistic profit from his blues and his hope that the one who spurned him might now be unhappy - unhappy enough to come back to him - might be the successor-in-irony to Hayes Carll's She Left Me for Jesus.
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