Oran Mor
Glasgow
***
I can feel your pain
When it cuts you
It cuts me too
***
02-10-24
I have just had the joy & pleasure & wonder & beauty & boy what a banging that gig was, mate, experiencing Asgard-voic’d 70 year old Robert Finley & his whippersnapper band of bluesmen for the first time. It won’t be the last, I’m sure, I’m a fan! Robert is a damn’d fine songwriter, with lyrics, chord progressions, vocal range & riffs that really resonated with my love of blues, & soul, & funk, & just everything really that Robert mish-mash’d up, pack’d in the oven of his creative soul & flung at our dancing shoes. “This man is an effing genius!” I kept saying to myself, like, all the time!
The bustling gig – the first of a short tour of the UK -, was upstairs at the Oran Mor, a gaudily decorated church of a space, like being in a medieval banquet on magic mushrooms, or summat. We were warm’d up for half an hour by Edinburgh-based soul & blues group, Jemmanuel, before Robert was led on stage by his eldest daughter, who would be tambourine-banging & singing backing, with a wee cameo centre-stage medley of her own towards the end of the set, including a stunning, ubersoulful, gemmy ‘Take Me to the River.’ Turns out both she & her daughter, Robert’s grand-daughter, sang on his last album, while this January they’ll all be singing on Robert’s new album, & also his daughter’s album. A real family affair, & there was an exceptional, yes familial, stage warmth to the event.
I particular remember him singing his new album’s singles, What Goes Around, & also this beautiful love ballad, I Want be your Man, dedicated to his wife or woman. Just bob on beautiful, as was Nobody Wants to be Lonely, written after visiting his friend in hospital after he’d suffer’d a stroke. Story songs, meaningful story songs, masterclasses in composing songs. “This man is an effing genius!” The album, Black Bayou, by the way, is his 4th – with his first only coming back in 2016 when he was 62. You can’t rush genius, clearly!
So, that was at the weekend, & I’m sat down writing my review, as you do, googling a couple of things – & I discover that Finley is ‘legally blind. A decade’s worth of glaucoma kinda vibe. I swear down, I would never have known! A couple of things made sense then; the way his daughter guided him on stage & onto the occasional chair for the mellower numbers. I thought he was juts unsteady on his feet being a septuagenarian or something. But then, the guy was pulling of some reyt dancing moves, so I knew it wasn’t his bodily physicality. So yeah, he’s legally blind, & that matters not a dot, for Finley is the sheer personification of the flourishing truth of blues.
Damo
themumble.uk 