Queens Hall
Edinburgh
19-04-26
Ah – I’ve just made a big pot of coffee & put on Eddie Reader, the Songs of Robbie Burns. It took me right back the winter of 2006-2007, & I was wintering on the Sicilian island of Marrettimo, a country Doonhamer girl with an affection for Burns. Being a Burnley boy, I’d never quite crack’d the Ayrshire Bard’s Lowland Scots, but I was while listening to Eddi Reader’s hauntingly evocative vocals in my Mediterranean idyll that I began to finally get him.
It was to hear Burns sung so ethereally was to truly understand his soul. Within two years I was writing an extended biographical poem on the lad, in Standard Hubbie, for 2009’s Homecoming celebration. Seventeen years later I finally got a chance to put a face & vibe to the voice – at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh. A pack’d house & a warm stage & an Eddi Reader in a smashing ‘welcome to the family’ mode. As she took to the stage in a silken apparel of sorts: this aesthetic, the lighting, & the eclectic musicianship of her band transported me to the Paris of Baudelaire. A perfect start.
Reader proceeded with divaesque, yet comfortingly natural, ease to carousel thro’ her percussionless-yet-still-bouncy acoustic repertoire. Reader’s Weegie energy & craik came tumbling forth throughout a lovely meld of Fairground Attraction stalwarts, several songs form the Burns album, a couple of cameos & a love song from her husband first heard in a phone-box in Beauly .
Towards the end she even invited us all to a family party in Maryhill, 1964 full of hair spitting brylcream & sweat, & falling pocket-change, which the 5-year old Eddi gleefully pounc’d on (not the brylcream). Then follow’d an extended segment which led to Eddi becoming her own mother, Jean, & the crowd urging her on to do a song, when “But its too early, I’ve no had a drink” finally relented into a laser-soft version of Moon River.
By the end, the entire auditorium was gushing along in a collective mantra, & I left the building buzzing to have finally tick’d off a Reader gig. Her album had profoundly chang’d my poetical direction, & I still intend to add more duans to the poem on Burns at some point. In fact, now seems a perfect time to do it. As Burns & Reader sang of spring’s sweet flourishing, so spring, I find, the perfect time to sing…
Words: Damo
Pics: Raymond Speedie
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