Celtic Connections review: King Creosote, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

King Creosote’s Celtic Connections set was a careful dance of the acoustic and the electronic, writes Fiona Shepherd

King Creosote, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow ****

King Creosote is dead, long live the King. Kenny Anderson, the man behind the moniker and head honcho of Fife’s Fence Records, has intimated that current album I DES will be his last as King Creosote. His capacity Celtic Connections audience, who scooped up tickets sharply to make this one of the festival’s fastest sell-outs, will likely only accept his abdication if it is replaced by the republic of Fence. A world without new Anderson songs would be a cold place indeed.

I DES is a mournful yet cathartic valediction which Anderson played start to finish in the company of musical chums including Lomond Campbell and Derek O’Neill (after whom the album is named) on keyboards and electronics, Hannah Fisher on fiddle and vocals and Mairearad Green on pipes and accordion.

The set was a careful dance of the acoustic and the electronic, with Fisher adding curt chords to the prelude of overlapping drones and several songs opening with an acoustic rendition before the rich electronics were layered over Anderson’s ambivalent mantras, such as the touching Blue Marbled Elm Trees, in which a prematurely aged Anderson looks back at his life and declares “I had the best time laughing with my girls”, and the rather desolate sentiments of Burial Bleak.

The nursery rhyme scurry of Susie Mullen offered a change of pace while Please Come Back I Will Listen, I Will Behave, I Will Toe the Line was shot through with a pulsing heartbeat of a rhythm and embellished with warm electric piano.

The album set was bookended by a cover of Tom T Hall’s country classic That's How I Got to Memphis running straight into Anderson’s Jon Hopkins collaboration Running On Fumes and the mournful violin hook, propulsive rhythm and baroque keyboards of Saffy Nool, before a parting shot of Kingly advice and a singalong jingle about Drybrough’s Heavy, an ale of yore.