Into Live Music Review: Edwyn Collins
To understand the scale of Edwyn Collins’ legacy, you have to rewind to 1976. Punk in London was flexing its muscles with The Damned and The Sex Pistols, but further north near Glasgow, a gangly teenager was sketching out his first band, the Nu-Sonics, in what was to become the Sound Of Young Scotland. By the time Orange Juice split in 1985, after a miners’ benefit appearance so low on the bill it was almost invisible, the band had already detonated a revolution in Scottish pop.
Collins’ subsequent solo career hit its zenith with 1994’s A Girl Like You – a sly, louche slice of Northern soul swagger that somehow conquered the world. Then, the devastating double brain haemorrhages in 2005 that should have ended everything. Instead, it became the focal point of one of music’s most remarkable comebacks. Through sheer bloody-mindedness and the lifeline of melody, Collins rebuilt himself with the help of wife, Grace Maxwell and countless health professionals. Since then, writing, recording, performing, reminding us all that pop music isn’t just entertainment, it’s survival.
And so to the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, for what may be the last chapter in that improbable saga. Collins walked on like a prizefighter – deliberate, defiant, cheered to the rafters. He sat for most of the night, but his voice still carried the mixture of wit and melancholy that defines his songwriting.
The set started, fittingly, at the beginning: Falling & Laughing, the first Orange Juice single, its bright guitars still a fanfare for possibility. From there, the show arced through solo gems and OJ classics before closing with Felicity and Blue Boy at which point, original comrades Steven Daly and James Kirk joined on stage, a reunion decades in the waiting. Add to this a shit-hot band that created a warm, enveloping sound, and an achingly beautiful duet with his son William, and it all started to get rather emotional.
Twenty-one songs whizzed by in one-hundred minutes. Followed by curtain calls that felt like they might never end. For the audience, a mixture of lifers, dreamers and wide-eyed pop pilgrims, it was laughter, tears and the deepest kind of gratitude. If this really is the end of Edwyn Collins on stage, it was the perfect full stop. His importance to Scottish music is incalculable, and the sheer fact that we were here, in this room, sharing these songs again, is its own miracle. We may never see his like again.
Brian Davidson @weepeople1
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