TRNSMT day two review: Gerry Cinnamon gives the crowd what it wants

TRNSMT

Glasgow Green

***

The second day of this annual gathering was largely dominated by earnest musicians with guitars. A few glistening pop shards were scattered throughout, but the bill was clearly geared towards the vast majority who’d turned up for Main Stage headliner Gerry Cinnamon.

Fair enough, the organisers know their audience.

An afternoon highlight on the King Tut’s Stage was Katie Gregson-Macleod, a promising young singer-songwriter from Inverness who closed her set of introspective confessionals with an amusingly incongruous cover of Wheatus’ pop-punk smash Teenage Dirtbag.

Over on the Main Stage, another young Scottish singer-songwriter, Dylan John Thomas, rattled through his repertoire of tuneful busker pop with a dour onstage demeanour entirely at odds with the music’s jauntiness.

Then, ‘80s pop survivor Rick Astley provided a welcome change of gear with an unabashedly crowd-pleasing performance packed with singalong hits and covers – basically the same set he played at Glastonbury last year. He’s a likeable pro.

Manchester’s Courteneers and Edinburgh’s Vistas couldn’t follow that, they plunged us into Now That’s What I Call Journeyman Indie Rock Anthems territory, before Cinnamon arrived to appease the faithful with his no-frills folk singer sincerity.

Meanwhile, King Tut’s headliner Cian Ducrot ploughed on heroically with his boilerplate David Gray-isms.

A grass-roots phenomenon, Cinnamon is to be admired for his dogged refusal to play the industry game. He got here on his own terms, and while I’ll never be a fan of his sometimes decent yet mostly unremarkable music, I get his populist appeal.

Attired in a black flat cap and raincoat combo, he strummed, sang and blew his harmonica over a backing track for 90 minutes – a pretty funny and borderline subversive way to headline a festival, but it worked. The People’s Busker gave ‘em what they wanted.