Gig review: Texas, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Still sexy without trying too hard, Sharleen Spiteri ruled the roost in An Evening With Texas

YOU know that old story about Glasgow audiences being the best that a band will ever play for? I’ve finally realised that it’s true.

Texas - Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

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At least it is if Sharleen Spiteri is on the stage. “Shut the f*** up, I’m trying to tell a story”, “Lulu’s in the house? Lulu yer dug?” – hecklers beware, Spiteri takes no prisoners.

From the moment she strolled on to the stage in a stripey T-shirt and a pair of slacks (contemporary women of pop music please take note – fully clothed, approaching 50, oozing sexiness) and picked up her guitar, to two-and-a-half hours later when she’d sung her way through the band’s 25 year career – I Don’t Want a Lover, Black-Eyed Boy, Summer Sun, Say What You Want – Spiteri was absolutely and utterly in control.

More than that, she was in her element. Funny and foul-mouthed, with a voice that sounds every bit as good as it ever has, Spiteri’s got enough stage presence to knock most pop stars for six.

The gig was billed as An Evening with Texas rather than a straight-up gig so there was plenty of banter – a man on the stage who claimed to be Jimmy Krankie, a woman in the audience who proposed to her partner, another who wandered from the upper circle to the stage to announce that it was her birthday and get a kiss. With any other singer, it might’ve been a distraction, but with Spiteri it was all an entertainment.

Seen on 22.04.15