Music review: Justin Townes Earle and Roseanne Reid, Oran Mor, Glasgow

Justin Townes Earle, son of Steve, was unfailingly entertaining company

A LONG spell out on the road together had taken its toll in different ways on both of this pair of country-folk singer-songwriter offspring of famous fathers. “I call this end of tour vocals,” joked Roseanne Reid, daughter of The Proclaimer’s Craig, sounding a touch hoarser than usual. Songs from her debut album Trails – one for fans of Gillian Welch – still soared. She left with the Mavis Staples indebted I Love Her So, before apologising that she couldn’t hang around to chat at the merch stall afterwards because a Dundee-bound train beckoned.

Justin Townes Earle and Roseanne Reid, Oran Mor, Glasgow ****

Six-and-a-half feet tall, tattooed and never one to duck out of saying what he means, Justin Townes Earle – roguish son of outlaw country legend Steve, and like his father, a frazzled-looking recovered drink and drug addict – was feeling the heat in the muggy Oran Mor basement. “You know what we have in our country… air conditioning!” he joked, in one of his more printable moments of amusing but thoroughly post-watershed banter.

His slightly rushed and slurred deliveries of songs from the title track of his new album The Saint of Lost Causes to the raucous Harlem River Blues were frustrating at times, but Earle was unfailingly entertaining company nonetheless, whether mercilessly laying into the venue’s catering or at one point threatening – to the point of checking he had underwear on underneath – to take off his trousers because he was so hot.

Instead he went shirtless for the encore, and a trademark beaten-up cover of Can’t Hardly Wait by The Replacements – righteously unruly outsiders with whom Earle evidently identifies.

MALCOLM JACK