Music
Electric Honey Sessions
Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Three stars
From Snow Patrol to Biffy Clyro, many of Scotland’s biggest bands got their start with Glasgow’s student-run record label, Electric Honey.
But the students of Glasgow Kelvin College are a versatile breed, as this all-day event - headlined by We Were Promised Jetpacks and Fatherson, and organised by the college’s events management and music business students - showed.
With acoustic sets from Mayor Stubbs and Finn LeMarinel, Young Aviators’ new electropop sound and the big band, country-folk stylings of Woodenbox and Harry & the Hendersons making up the rest of the lineup, it didn’t score any points for diversity: Glasgow songwriter Chrissy Barnacle, singing with LeMarinel, was the only woman on stage during a seven-hour show. But the day ran so smoothly that country-folk seven-piece and collection of haircuts Harry & the Hendersons got an extra 10 minutes on their set, and had gained an eighth member on saxophone by the end of it.
Given he was accompanied only by acoustic guitar at some points, you’d have expected LeMarinel’s melancholy, emotive voice to get lost in a 2,500-seat open air amphitheatre. Instead, his songs were an incredibly moving scene-setter before the evening’s noisier bands. Barnacle’s atmospheric backing vocals and the echoey electric guitar part played by Brian Docherty made new song Mess Made sound as though it coalesced from the afternoon air, while LeMarinel’s vocals added emotional weight to the title track from his Love Is Waves EP.
And when the weather turned against us, Woodenbox lifted the mood with music somewhere between big band and folk, warped circus tent and satanic revival. Their pachydermic brass section kicked off an impromptu dance party during Hang The Noose, and even the comparatively delicate A9 North got a breathtaking chorus.
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