Gig review: The Fratellis; Glasgow ABC

By DAVE POLLOCK
Published on 27/09/2012 03:17

THE return of professional football chant writers the Fratellis has been unclamoured for on a grand scale, but with the disappointing performance of singer Jon Fratelli’s solo career and his side project, Codeine Velvet Club, they might as well have gotten on with it.

And now they had returned, it seemed their hometown crowd had been waiting for this moment all along – the ABC was rammed full for this comeback show, and every song was met with nothing less than ferocious approval.

It was one of those nights, in all fairness, where band and audience came together and rode a wave of harmonised euphoria. There was little chat from the trio (a quartet on stage, with the renewed addition of a keyboard player giving the music extra texture) and precious little variation in musical styles, although their plundering of old rock ’n’ roll tropes ran the gamut from the imitation ’60s beat group pop of Babydoll to the entertaining, Faces-style bar-room blues of Acid Jazz Singer. Listening to their key songs here, in fact, the likes of Whistle For The Choir and Baby Fratelli sounded like the illegitimate children of Rod Stewart and the Libertines.

The calls for “one more tune” before the encore could be taken literally, in that there was really only one other song the audience absolutely had to hear, but that the sweat-fogged frenzy of Chelsea Dagger was penultimate to another unexpectedly enjoyable guilty pleasure in A Heady Tale was indicative of the band’s capacity for raucous if one-note live entertainment.

Rating: * * * *