Our verdict: four stars
A lot can happen in 25 years, noted the pop polymath. For one obvious thing, both Kane (P) and Kane (G) have shed their youthful locks, and now sport shaved pates with pride.
But a quarter of a century is also a useful peg to hang a revival on, which is why their home audience in Glasgow is being treated to two special gigs this weekend.
Friday night's show revisits Bitter Suite, the eclectic classic of 1989 which spans covers of Kate Bush's The Man with the Child in his Eyes, Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding, and Round Midnight by Thelonius Monk.
It also opens, ideally for this crowd, with Mother Glasgow, and closes with the painful fraternal antipathy of Remote, when Pat and Greg were in a period of open hatred.
The gig is deliberately "stripped", with only occasional contributions from guest artists on violin, guitar and sax (with special praise here for the haunting tones of Paul Towndrow).
That means it stands or falls on the Kane gang's own merits - Greg's fluid, driving keyboards, and Pat's vocals, suitably plaintive for his poetic lyrics.
It stands. For the most part, it is a faithful rendition of what went before, with only minor tweaks.
But the best and bravest move was to radically reconstruct a Hue and Cry favourite, Looking for Linda, now recast as Slow Train Home, with a different if comparable narrative about humanity fighting against the odds.
It raised the hour-long set to a new level, and proved that Kane (P) is still capable of powerful songwriting.
Then, with a merciful absence of fanfare, they went off and quickly came back to encore with the promised audience requests slot (a crowd of tonight's maturity doesn't really need to suspend disbelief…we knew that they knew that we knew they were always returning).
So, by popular acclaim, we had Violently, a cover of Paolo Nutini's Last Request, Labour of Love, Stars Crash Down, and She Makes a Sound.
A compact 90 minutes, and it was all over. But quality triumphs over quantity, and they'll be back to do a "full band" version of the Remote album on Saturday night.
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