Gig review: Scott Hutchison

Published on Monday 7 September 2009 18:58

SCOTT HUTCHISON **** ELECTRIC CIRCUS, EDINBURGH

IT'S Saturday evening, Scotland have just won an important game of football and the lone guitarist on stage before us is geeing the crowd up with an inoffensive running joke about Macedonians, the national team's opponents of the day.

Every other open mic night in the land probably saw a similar scene unfold at the weekend, but this was no ordinary solo set.

The singer-songwriter in question, Scott Hutchison, is the frontman of Frightened Rabbit, one of Scotland's biggest home-grown musical successes of the last year or two, and this rare solo appearance had at least a couple of hundred excited fans packing Electric Circus to its neon-tinted karaoke booths.

The atmosphere was as lively as you might expect after such a result, but noisiness didn't spill over into rowdiness.

Hutchison worked the crowd well, telling anecdotes, fielding yelled requests diplomatically (of course we were going to hear Poke, but half-way through the set was "too early") and bashfully acknowledging beery shouts of "'mon the Rabbit!".

Shorn of his bandmates, the richness of Hutchison's singing voice and its occasionally glaring folk inflection (notably during a version of The Twist) came to the fore.

While the epic, guitar-laden drama of the full Frightened Rabbit experience was not recreated, the audience's generous vocal accompaniment during signature tracks My Backwards Walk and eventually Poke itself was in characteristic full flow.