Gig review: Charlotte Church, Glasgow

For someone who first came to prominence in her early teens on the back of a quite breathtaking vocal ability, it’s become all too easy to forget these days that Charlotte Church is a singer. Between adoration in lad’s mags, her ill-starred marriage to Gavin Henson, minor TV stardom and eventually the fallout from her tabloid ubiquity at the Leveson Inquiry, Charlotte Church the performer seems to have been all but forgotten.

Rating: * * *

King Tut’s, Glasgow

You might certainly think so upon witnessing this busy but nowhere near sold-out King Tut’s show, which served as either a fall from grace should Church be precious about her former status as celebrity flavour of the month, or a refreshing change in the more likely event of her just wanting to get back to what she’s good at before genuine fans. Besides speaking out on press regulation recently, Church has also been touring the smaller venues of the UK, her show consisting of a reinvention of herself as a mainstream rock artist, free from label dictats.

What this meant in practice was an odd show that was both musically uninspiring – her young five-piece band sound like a merger of the Killers and Evanescence – yet ultimately quite engaging purely on the basis of Church’s still attention-grabbing vocal on tracks like her Leveson response Judge From Afar and recent single How Not to Be Surprised When You’re a Ghost. By way of demonstration her excuse for the lack of encore was: “I feel like a dick’ead when I stand there waiting.” So instead, she signed off on the disco-tinged James, a joyful finale that helped restate the reason for her fame in the first place.

David Pollock