Gig review: Music Like A Vitamin

Published on Friday 2 October 2009 20:24

OLD FRUITMARKET, GLASGOW ****

THIS opening night concert for the 2009 Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival didn't quite achieve the intimate feel it was aiming for, with candlelit tables spread across the Old Fruitmarket floor – the venue was probably too large and the line-up a little too disparate. Yet the performers – selected by curators and compres Emma Pollock and Karine Polwart – were individually fantastic.

Fife singer-songwriter James Yorkston and Dubliner Adrian Crowley opened with a special performance of the songs of American lo-fi legend Daniel Johnston, an artist whose battle with mental health demons has been well-documented. They gave his tunes delicate and sparse arrangements, even singing some a cappella.

Former Delgados singer Pollock was the only artist to play with a full electric band, and her set was the loudest and most engaging of the night. She joked that everyone should "note the fire exits" ahead of the show's collaborative grand finale, which was being cooked up spontaneously backstage.

Then things went off at a rootsy tangent, with sets from sweet-voiced melodic folk singer Karine Polwart, and avant-garde folkie Alasdair Roberts. Perhaps some people hadn't anticipated quite such a change of tack, because the crowd had started to thin a bit by that point.

They can regret not sticking around for the concert's coda, as all of the performers gathered onstage, Band Aid-style, for a couple of gloriously ramshackle renditions of songs from Yorkston's canon: traditional Blue Bleezin' Blind Drunk and a Lal Waterson number. It wasn't quite incendiary, as promised, but it was heart-warming.