This was a game of two halves – both of them headlined by Pictish Trail, aka Johnny Lynch, and his band.
The Scottish leg of this tour had some arts funding attached to it and BM suspects the original suggested format may have been an acoustic half and an electric half. As it is, the capacity crowd in this smallish basement venue (good turnout for a Tuesday night though) were treated to a couple of acoustic numbers by Johnny solo before, ‘Stop Making Sense’ style, other band members (“Eigg’s sexiest man” on electric guitar, Guto on bass and the drummer whose name BM did not quite catch) arrived so that by about halfway into the set they were in full flight. There was a break of around 20 minutes (mainly to sell booze and merch) before the foursome (with former collaborator Suze Bear called up to provide backing vocals on a couple of ‘Thumb World’-era tracks) cranked things up further with fearsome versions of mainly the new ‘Island Family’ material.
Johnny bantered amiably with the audience before encouraging them in participation (“Why don’t we all turn around – no, right round”). ‘Green Mountain’ was dedicated as usual to PT’s annual pilgrimage to Green Man Festival in Wales, the band played some further older material but pretty much blew themselves off the stage with a furious, raging version of ‘Natural Successor’.
The second set ended with ‘Browbeaten’, a Silver Columns track from around 2010 that was probably the oldest material played tonight. Further dates in the Borders and then doon south follow – this band and the new album are hugely impressive and as BM has previous said, Pictish has now fully realised his own musical and lyrical potential that we always knew he had.