Music
Lowe, Carrack and Low
Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow
Stuart Morrison
five stars
THERE was a nice moment before this gig started, when Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy was played over the PA. Having sung along to it, the near capacity crowd applauded, a poignant tribute to one of the greats and setting the scene for the arrival on stage of three more.
Nick Lowe, Paul Carrack and Andy Fairweather Low each have a pedigree as long as your arm, with about a century of writing and playing between them and it shows, wonderfully. Equipped only with acoustic guitars, they wandered onstage and eased into Travelling Light, an entirely appropriate choice of opener. A joyful meander through their favourite tunes followed, interspersed with some of their own hits. Goodnight Irene, Merle Haggard’s Shelley’s Winter Love and Sea of Heartbreak were superb. Andy Fairweather Low took us back some fifty years to his Amen Corner days, with Bend Me Shake Me and If Paradise Was Half as Nice, in addition to his later solo hit, Wide Eyed and Legless. Nick Lowe gave us the gorgeous Cruel to be Kind and I Knew The Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll) and Paul Carrack, surely one of the most distinctive voices of the last forty years, ended the show with How Long.
It was great to see how much they enjoyed playing together, perhaps because they do it so rarely. "This is our second gig of year," Fairweather Low informed us but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the performance. They encored with Nick Lowe’s, never more apt, Peace Love and Understanding, but the Bandstand crowd refused to let them go until they returned with a jaunty reading of Lonnie Donegan’s Putting on the Style.
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