Music review: k.d. lang, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

AS k.d. lang noted with a hint of impish amusement, 2019 marks the second anniversary of the 25th anniversary of Ingenue, the album which recast the Canadian country singer as a charismatic crooner in the top flight of modern vocalists. What better time to celebrate this “meditation on romance” by revisiting its seductive songcraft in track order in the hands of an inspired band of musicians?

K.d. Lang PIC: Suzanne Cordeiro/Shutterstock

k.d. lang, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ****

Glasgow was in, from the moment the band struck up a sultry rhythm behind a velvet curtain, which duly parted to reveal lang in meditative pose at the microphone, ready to deliver the deliciously ambivalent plea of Save Me and the self-soothing inquiry of The Mind of Love, aching yet rapturous over blushing bossa nova tones.

The music, the lyrical themes, the vocal delivery were all classic yet entirely free of the whiff of pastiche. Back in 1992, lang had found her style and she still wears it well all these years later as a self-confessed “gay senior”. One moment, she was the model of sensitive expression and immaculate phrasing, the next transforming into the playful, coquettish Miss Chatelaine, eliciting delighted guffaws from the crowd as she skipped, pirouetted and gallivanted about the stage, a woman smitten. The feeling was reciprocal, as the audience willingly succumbed to the love-in.

The mood switched back to introspective with the exquisite Roy Orbison-style 
devotional croon Wash Me Clean. So It Shall Be continued the romantic supplication, bathed in Rich Hinman’s 
burnished pedal steel, tremulous rather than twanging, and the epic, organic Season of Hollow Soul was a band tour de force.

Individual members had their moment in the spotlight with plangent bass solo from David Piltch, Spanish guitar frills from Grecco Burrato and Daniel Clarke on the soulful accordion riff which accompanied her breakthrough hit Constant Craving and closed the album portion of proceedings.

Lang celebrated with a deserved swing of the mic but was far from finished, as the swaggering serenade I Dream of Spring gave way to a trio of classic Canadian covers which showcased lang’s mighty interpretative powers. Joni Mitchell’s Help Me was delivered straight and true, but she bent Neil Young’s Helpless to her will and captured the desolation in Leonard Cohen’s by now over-familiar Hallelujah before dialling down the raw emotion for the comforting coda of Sing It Loud and mass seduction of Sleeping Alone.

FIONA SHEPHERD