Thirty-one years down the line, it would have been foolish to expect Nanci Griffith to take any risks, but did it really have to be this safe?

Nanci Griffith
City Halls, Glasgow
***

Thirty-one years down the line, it would have been foolish to expect Nanci Griffith to take any risks, but did it really have to be this safe?

"Very predictable," was the opinion of one fan after the show, "but good to see her still enjoying it." This was true. Griffith took the stage with a nice story about how she had just set off the alarm in the ladies washroom instead of switching on the light. And her chat with the crowd was a highlight of the proceedings, as was the tastefully subtle backing she received from her two-piece band, Thomm Jutz on guitars and Pat McInerny on percussion.

From a Distance was dispensed with very quickly and, although it was infinitely superior to Sir Cliff's reading, it remained gruesomely twee.

It's the down-homey, hokey element to Griffith's work that alienates as many as it attracts. Then there was, by her own admission, the most important song she has ever written, It's a Hard Life Wherever You Go, which is brutally forthright on the subjects of sectarian and racial hatred in Belfast and Chicago. "The first couple of verses have become irrelevant," she told us. Indeed, recent events have put a radically different slant on these particular situations, but the basic message - that "if we poison our children with hatred, then the hard life is all that they'll know" - remains as horribly true today as when she wrote it. It was a powerful performance of the song, made even more effective by the sympathetic playing of Jutz and McInerny.

Other highlights included Love at the Five and Dime and her final song, Road to Aberdeen, performed unaccompanied and immaculately.

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