Gig review: The Futureheads, Glasgow, Oran Mor

“DOES anybody know how to tune a banjo?” isn’t the question you’d most expect to hear from a band whose music usually closes indie discos, but then the Futureheads’ latest tour is a lesson in defying expectations.

Billed as an acoustic and acapella set, it saw the Sunderland quartet adapt their own music and others’ to styles best suited to the middle of last century.

It helped that the band themselves are blessed with a warm but biting communal sense of humour, their dry jokes fitting into the same entertainment lineage as those working men’s clubs they once toured early in their career. Barry Hyde introduced his “Mackem bluegrass” version of Hard to Bear as being about a friend who split with his girlfriend (“I took his misery and I turned it into pure profit”), while bassist David “Jaff” Craig endured ribbing for the accidental de-tuning of that banjo. “Nothing’s ever the same once your fingers have touched it,” winked Ross Millard.

Such light entertainment before a modest seated audience sometimes disguised the pristine quality of these new arrangements, from a transcendental barber shop quartet reading of Kelis’ Acapella to an almost skiffle take on their own Decent Days & Nights and the folk qualities of Carnival Kids (“mixed with Battle of Evermore, a wee bit”). Their lyric-writing shone through here, and their range of influences stretched from medieval folk ballad Sumer is Icumen In to the Television Personalities’ The Picture of Dorian Grey, creating a memorable facet to their career.

Rating: ****