Gig review: The Nightingales/Ted Chippington, Nice’n’Sleazy, Glasgow

THERE is no shortage of support acts out there who might be considered a joke, but it is rare to find a rock band supported by a comedian.

The Nightingales/Ted Chippington

Nice’n’Sleazy, Glasgow

****

Ted Chippington, a long-standing associate of main attraction The Nightingales, prefers the term “anti-comedian”. His diffident style has been known to provoke anything from bemusement to bottle-throwing. But the partisan crowd gathered in the basement of Sleazys had nothing but affection for the hesitant performer, arguably the only comedian able to offer his audience “more Torquay material”.

While time appeared to have stood still for Chippington, The Nightingales have been reborn as a mean machine since returning to active duty in the past decade. Former Prefects frontman Robert Lloyd is still the helmsman, with Prefects guitarist Alan Apperley on the wing, but these 80s Peel favourites are a different band these days, with the recruitment of three bright young things, Matt Wood (aka the Teen Guitar Sensation) plus Andreas Schmid and Fliss Kitson on bass and drums, all primed to deliver.

The blunt, racous attack of their new album No Love Lost was finessed into a seamless set of powering post-punk rock’n’roll by a fiery unit who were totally in command, only letting up the momentum to dip into brief bursts of Ian Dury-style punk vaudeville, low-slung rumble, precision prog punk picking and an a capella interlude, before capping their virile set with a snarling psychedelic freak-out jam.