Gig review: The Jazzateers/ Vic Godard, Glasgow

THE Jazzateers have waited a long time to play their debut album – thirty years, in fact.

The Jazzateers/Vic Godard

Stereo, Glasgow

* * * *

The Glasgow band split not long after its release, having arrived a little late to the Postcard Records party, then getting their coat before capitalising on their potential.

As fate or dumb luck would have it, bass player and founder member Keith Band has broken his collarbone so was unable to participate in this reunion which attracted many of their peers from the Glasgow music scene of the time.

Their set sounded remarkably fresh for something which has been lying dormant for all of 30 years.

Nothing At All’s blend of melody and bite, the swagger and style of Sixteen Reasons and the full throttle Texan brazenly mined classic Velvets/Television influences which have yet to fall out of favour.

The white funk of Once More With Feeling and Show Me The Door dated things more specifically.

So too did the suave vocals of Grahame Skinner, late of Hipsway, but only in the warmest nostalgic sense, while the angular, chiming Heartbeat, the strident jangle of Looking For A Girl and choppy rockabilly rhythm and guitar heroics of Baby That’s A No No barely showed their age.

Providing the jazz at this Glasgow Jazz Festival gig – notwithstanding the headliners’ name and their brief bossa nova phase – was renaissance punk Vic Godard, a man who could justifiably claim to have influenced the entire Sound of Young Scotland circa 1981.

The debonair Mr Godard, backed by a pavement cafe-style scratch band comprising members of Aztec Camera, Orange Juice and Del Amitri, accessed his innate, untutored crooner for an idiosyncratic and, at times, impish set of Tin Pan Alley standards, including a touching rendition of Stardust, followed by scrappy selections from the mellow/cute end of the Velvet Underground catalogue and a rowdy run at Orange Juice’s Felicity.