Gig review: The Silencers

THE SILENCERS ***ORAN MOR, GLASGOW

"CROWDED House wrote a song called Four Seasons in One Day," mused The Silencers' singer Jimmie O'Neill. "It was about Glasgow, apparently. Well, I wrote this song…"

And with that, he and his band launched into a version of their own Scottish Rain, a stocky grafter of a track first released 20 years ago in 1989.

This short exchange said a lot. The former song is many, many times better-known than the latter, but in a Glasgow venue in front of their own crowd, the Silencers' track held its own.

More than that, in fact, its implicit reference to the Chernobyl disaster is both more lyrically expansive than anything in the Crowded House song, and also more of its time.

And that really sums up this contingent of Glaswegian former session musicians – really quite decent, for those who choose to listen, and utterly time-locked for those who had forgotten all about them.

Dressed all in black, just like the rest of the original line-up on stage with him, O'Neill helped make it acceptable to have a somewhat dour commitment to noisy, epic guitars long before Glasvegas came along.

An array of similarly-sculpted fan favourites like Painted Moon, I See Red, Bulletproof Heart and The Real McCoy were always more Simple Minds than Jesus and Mary Chain, but a packed-out hometown crowd really made the show work for O'Neill and Co.