Celtic Connections
Lucinda Williams
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Alan Morrison
Four stars
A WAIL of electric blues guitar greeted Lucinda Williams when she stepped onto the Celtic Connections stage, and that pretty much set the tone for a gig that at times rocked harder than anything you’d expect from someone with a country background who turns 63 next Tuesday.
Williams was 45 when the Grammy Award-winning Car Wheels On A Gravel Road broke her internationally in 1998. It’s still the songs on the set list from that album – Can’t Let Go, Drunken Angel, Lake Charles, Joy – that conjure up the best bar-stool romance you’ve never had, her voice slurring off to the side of the beat in a manner that’s seductive, sad and full of spirit.
Surprisingly Williams only included two songs from her new album, The Ghosts Of Highway 20, released this week: a Springsteen-styled solo acoustic rendition of the title track and a full-band blow-out on Dust. It was during the latter, placed more or less halfway through her 18-song set, that her three fellow musicians shifted everything up a gear.
Regular cohorts on Williams’s records and tours, Stuart Mathis (guitar), David Sutton (bass) and Eels original Butch Norton (drums) play together as heavy blues jammers Buick 6. Virtuosic in their individual rights and a formidable force as a unit, they threatened to steal Williams’s thunder as the intensity grew on Are You Down?, Protection and Honey Bee.
As is her way, Williams threw a couple of covers into her encore – Robert Johnson’s Stop Breakin’ Down Blues and JJ Cale’s Magnolia. But with this band on board, it was her own songs, cranked up to the max, that thrived on the live stage, helped by the hall’s immaculate sound.
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