Review: Janis Ian / Simon Lynge - City Halls, Glasgow

THERE was a potent atmosphere of defiantly affirmative sentiment at this well-attended and rapturously received Celtic Connections pairing.

“I have travelled to the future/And I liked what I saw,” ran the emblematic title track from The Future, the debut album by up-and-coming Greenland-born singer-songwriter Simon Lynge, rounding off his resolutely untortured, openhearted set.

“It’s a miracle of nature/Just to be alive tonight,” began newly sexagenarian headliner Janis Ian, 20 minutes later, with her longtime-love song This Throughout the Year.

Ian, who scored her first hit aged just 15 with the classic plea for tolerance Society’s Child – which featured in her setlist here, and shares its title with her rave-reviewed 2008 autobiography – has been a welcome regular at Celtic Connections since the festival’s early years, and this latest return visit saw the diminutive, peroxide-cropped balladeer clearly in a mood to embrace her seasoned-veteran status.

Other key tracks included When the Party’s Over and Watercolors, their opening bars both greeted with a ripple of applause, while that recent life-story project was reflected in a Loudon Wainwright-esque send-up of the showbiz autobiography phenomenon, and the similarly droll, tellingly barbed Married in London, about her 20-year gay partnership’s varied legal status around the world. Spoken-word interludes about some of her travails and her artistic philosophy tended towards the gushily sententious and even self-aggrandising – but most of her audience evidently loved it.

RATING: ***