Del Amitri, Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow ****

The flash of a “sold out” sticker alongside every gig at this year’s Summer Nights festival must be gratifying to everyone involved, and few more so than Glasgow’s own Del Amitri. They play two shows this week, and apparently demand meant they could have sold out even more.

There’s a particular alchemy that happens when the members of this group get back together, as they recently did for their seventh album Fatal Mistakes in 2021, and on a dry, clear, only slightly overcast Wednesday night, they demonstrated why that is.

Throughout their music, there always existed a pining, bittersweet taste of nostalgia and loss, and now, more than two decades on from their last big hit, the impressive range of much-loved songs they built up during the late ‘80s and ‘90s provided 90 minutes of memory-steeped greatest hits.

Yet they opened with a recent song, the gentle acoustic murmur of Every Night Has a Dawn, its opening lyrics (“summer night, summer rain / hello to the sight of you again… everyone is here”) perfectly matched to the occasion. The low-key tone continued through Be My Downfall and All Hail Blind Love, until the first of those big hits, Always the Last to Know, drew the audience to their feet.

Despite his own protestations about his repartee being poor and fake-grumpy complaints that nobody bought Waking Hours, home of the adored Kiss This Thing Goodbye, Currie is a warm and genial host whose singing voice still bristled with tender sadness on Driving With the Brakes On and Move Away, Jimmy Blue.

There were refreshing stopovers in bleary West Coast rock amid the fusion of Lonely and Spit in the Rain, and noisy teenage indie-punk on Drunk in a Band, but those hits – Here and Now, Roll to Me, Nothing Ever Happens – remained the centrepiece, and the emotional focus of their creators’ playing refreshed them anew here.

Music review: Del Amitri, Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow