Paolo Nutini, Glasgow Summer Sessions, review: Cheeky charms make up for lack of hula hoops
It seems apparent that the live stage is the best context in which to hear him
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Your support makes all the difference.“I'm sorry guys, my dog ate my hula hoop,” growls Paolo Nutini in the gruff Paisley drawl which belies the versatility of his singing voice. It’s a reference to his support act at this first of two festival-scaled Glasgow Summer Sessions concerts on a public park in the suburbs of the city, with Calvin Harris due to headline the following day - not widely-tipped Glasgow shoegazers Tuff Love or Nutini’s dependably raucous Dundonian compatriots The View, but rather Grace Jones, an unexpected festival announcement which knocks Mumford & Sons at Reading and Leeds into the shade.
Nutini’s a popular and versatile international artist with a feverish following on home territory – all 35,000 tickets for the event were gone in advance – but it perhaps went without saying that nothing he could have done would have competed with Jones, all 67 well-preserved years of her, hula-hooping in the Glasgow drizzle to the immaculate sex-funk grind of ‘Slave to the Rhythm’. Yet Nutini has charms of his own, most of them of a somewhat cheekier variety. “This song is about very fast women,” he winks, raising a full glass of red before a dramatically retooled medley of ‘Jenny Don’t Be Hasty’ paired with ‘New Shoes’.
Infused with a classicist’s vinyl-only sensibility, the opening ‘Scream (Funk My Life Up)’ is bolstered from its limp recorded version by a thundering disco baseline. There is a swooning old-time musical sensibility to ‘One Day’, a frantic exuberance to ‘Pencil Full of Lead’, and a lovely, thinly-veiled political coda to ‘Iron Sky’ as Charlie Chaplin’s speech from ‘The Great Dictator’ rings out over a fusillade of blood-red fireworks. As he encores with a creditable version of Ben E King’s ‘Stand By Me’, it seems apparent that the live stage is the best context in which to hear Nutini. Preferably in Glasgow.
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