I nipped a couple of towns up to the Adam Smith Theatre in Kirkcaldy on Saturday night (16/09/2017) for Tae Sup Wi’ a Fifer (@superfifer). The evening, curated by East Neuk kingpin James Yorkston, was the first in a short pre-Christmas season that includes some stellar names: Philip Selway of Radiohead, Mercury Prize nominee Kathryn Williams, and folk grandee Alasdair Roberts are all to come in late November and early December.
This weekend’s show featured folk duo Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock, performance poet Salena Godden, and iconic Scottish duo The Vaselines performing an electro-acoustic set. A quick disclaimer before the following review, such as it is – I wasn’t taking notes, so haven’t made any rash claims about setlist order, and am happy to tweak things if readers know them to be wrong!
(There’s a professional review here that includes some videos.)
Acting as compere, Yorkston began the evening with stripped-down Irish bouzouki renditions of a couple of tunes from his classic debut album Moving Up Country, starting with ‘In Your Hands’ (the lovely original is below). His self-effacing claim that these were the only two songs he could remember on it speaks to his charm as a performer: a modest musician with serious skill and excellent songs.
The first act, following him, was Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock. Waterson, of the legendary British folk clan, made no bones about the fact that she was recovering from a chest infection, but still provided some powerful moments of a cappella singing. Those skills were put to the test with a moment of necessary improvisation as Jaycock snapped a guitar string in moving between the complex tunings that give his playing a distinctive tone. His playing skill extended to the effects and looping pedals that enabled the creation of densely layered harmonies to back. I hadn’t come across their work before, but will certainly look out for them in the future; they’ve a new album, Death had Quicker Wings than Love [title track below], out imminently.
Salena Godden tore through the middle of the evening. Filled with righteous and entertaining anger about everything from Trump to the ‘tampon tax’, she delivered her material with insistence (not least rhetorically, threefold repetition being a key part of her delivery) and good humour. It was entertaining to imagine what Yorkston said was an initial train station meeting taking place – their personas certainly are not natural bedfellows.
Judging by the audience reaction, however, most were there to see The Vaselines, who performed as a duo: Frances McKee on electric guitar, and Eugene Kelly playing an acoustic lead. For a seminal band (thanks to Kurt Cobain’s patronage) with a compact back catalogue, these pared-down renditions really captured the strong songwriting underneath the lo-fi charm that characterised their early records.
The Vaselines began their set with the curmudgeonly and catchy ‘I Hate the 80’s’ [above] (‘It wasn’t all Duran Duran Duran Duran…’), from their 2010 ‘comeback’ record Sex with an X – although whether you can really call an album that after 21 years without a new release tests even the Stone Roses principle (or is it the LL Cool J principle?). The upbeat title track from that record, punningly referring to the fact that Kelly and McKee were once a couple, also made an appearance (the winning tongue-in-cheek lyrics, again – ‘Feels so good, it must be bad for me…’). Their most recent LP ‘V for Vaselines’ was represented by ‘High Tide Low Tide’.
There were plenty of songs from their classic early releases in the set, too. The driving ‘Oliver Twisted’ came early in the set, and the Nirvana-endorsed trio were present and correct: ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’ was moving, ‘Molly’s Lips’ bounced briefly along, and McKee, on entertainingly spiky form all evening, revealed her enduring lack of enthusiasm for ‘Son of a Gun’.
They closed (if I remember correctly) with ‘Dying for It’, Kelly’s protestations that he was ‘hanging on’ feeling very different acoustically and with the benefit of maturity, compared with the squalling guitars of the original, youthful EP version [below].
I came away ruminating on how odd it must be to have this sort of fame. The Vaselines were in the orbit of one of the biggest bands of the last thirty years. It’s rumoured that Frances Bean Cobain is named after Frances McKee, and Kelly toured the US after The Vaselines split with his next band Captain America (who later, for pretty obvious legal reasons, became Eugenius). What must it feel like to be playing Kirkcaldy on a September Saturday? The ease of their demeanour with each other, and the joy of their recent records suggests that it’s still fun – it certainly was to be there.
Finally, it’s great that this sort of artistic gathering is being supported in Fife – thanks Creative Scotland.
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