Music

Kiefer Sutherland

O2ABC, Glasgow

Graeme Virtue

four stars

IN A screen career spanning over three decades, Kiefer Sutherland has played a lot of different characters. On stage at the ABC, he seems to be relishing his latest role: a grizzled, grinning 50-year-old country singer touring the UK in support of a pretty good debut album.

The former Young Gun and CTU troubleshooter certainly looks the part in worn jeans, neck rag and white gaucho hat. Crucially, Sutherland sounds convincing too. His vocal delivery – a variant of Jack Bauer’s urgent, commanding rasp familiar from dozens of hectic interrogations on 24 – is a pleasing fit for the hardscrabble songs of heartbreak and hard liquor that feature on his Down In A Hole record.

During the mid-1990s, Sutherland worked the rodeo circuit, so his bronco-busting posturing doesn’t feel too much like an affectation. Similarly, his well-documented hell-raising adds some heft to the sozzled waltz of Not Enough Whiskey and the road house boogie of Ways to be Wicked. A rowdy, raucous four-piece backing band allow Sutherland to focus on being a frontman, geeing up the sold-out crowd with well-timed air punches during songs and wrangling them with pleasingly off-colour anecdotes in between. It helps that his songs are immediate enough to grab even those who may have only come to gawk at a Hollywood star off the reservation, and that he interleaves them with some well-chosen Merle Haggard, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan covers.

Midway through the first of two encores, the audience burst into a spontaneous, five-minute long ovation and if Sutherland’s slightly dazed, moist-eyed reaction to all the emphatic hollering is an act, it’s a damn good one.