Gig review: Toby Keith

Published on Tuesday 10 November 2009 17:58

TOBY KEITH *** ACADEMY, GLASGOW

HE'S topped the American country singles chart every year since his debut album in 1993, and hit No1 with every album since 2001. His total album sales exceed 30 million, and his songs have notched up more than 63 million broadcasts . Despite his remarkable career statistics, though, Toby Keith remains best known for his 2002 hit Courtesy of the Red, White And Blue (The Angry American), a bare-knuckle riposte to the 11 September, 2001 attacks that made him a patriots' poster-boy and a liberal hate-figure.

Even taking all these facts together, it is still tricky to get Keith's measure. The brash swagger of his stage persona, plentifully in evidence here, along with his annual trips to entertain the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, might seem to peg him as a true-blue, neo-traditionalist act. Resisting this pigeonhole, however, are his avowed support for public healthcare and ambivalence on illegal immigration, plus his Glasgow setlist's inclusion of I'll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again, a rueful yet gleeful account of Willie Nelson's fabled hospitality, ruing less the fact of having partaken than the sucker-punch potency of Nelson's stash.

What came across on this occasion, from what was a mini-retrospective show – tailored for his first European tour – was a highly likeable artist capable of considerable verbal and emotional sophistication, often via adroit self-parody, and armed with a beefy, rugged, richly-hued voice, who is nonetheless keenly aware which side of the mainstream he is on.