Gig review: Alison Moyet, Glasgow

FROM her years as one half of Yazoo to a 2.5 million-selling solo career, since the early 80s Alison Moyet has cut an idiosyncratic path through a music industry that’s never quite figured out how to pigeonhole her.

Alison Moyet. Picture: Getty

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

****

Punk-rocker, synth-pop sensation, smoky jazz chanteuse or big-voiced soul belter? The Essex singer has been all of the above at some point, and has kept followers on their toes again by making a return to her electronic past on new album The Minutes, her first top-five since 1987.

“This is the Moyet-doing-electro tour,” she told everyone after pounding opener Horizon Flame, silhouetted against a backdrop of glittering stars and flanked by two very serious looking blokes on synths. “No jazz standards,” she continued. “If my people didn’t tell your people, then sorry.”

Dressed all in black, she chatted amusingly about the strange dichotomy of singing songs about middle age – The Minutes’ centrepiece Filigree being a key track on that theme – next to others such as Nobody’s Diary that she penned when still just a teenager.

Only You transposed into a minor key was a slightly disappointing if understandable effort to mix things up a little (“I’m in danger of becoming an Alison Moyet tribute act”), while the dubstep-flavoured Changeling saw one of electronic music’s veteran voices nod to the genre’s here and now. It took combination of Love Resurrection and Situation to finally liberate the audience from their seats, before Don’t Go classily re-ignited the synth-pop sound of future past.