Live review: My Darling Clementine @ The Fallen Angels Club. Glad Café, Glasgow. Friday 24th November 2023.

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Glasgow’s no stranger to witnessing the odd bout of bickering between married couples and so it was that an almost sold out crowd crammed into the Southside’s Glad Café to welcome back our favourite marital sparring partners, My Darling Clementine, in anticipation of what we used to call, “a good clean fight.”

Lou Dalgleish and Michael Weston King, the two warring elements of My Darling Clementine, have long proved to be one of the UK’s favourite acts, taking the long held premise that country music can’t abide a happy pairing and transforming that into a hugely entertaining show. It helps of course that the pair have released a series of albums in which they sing superbly of the twists and turns and the ups and downs of being in a relationship, cleverly updating old Nashville tropes.

They used to take to the stage as a recording of George Jones and Tammy Wynettes’ wedding vows was played but tonight it was the stabbing keyboards of Timmy Thomas’ Why Can’t We Live Together which announced their appearance, Dalgleish resplendent in her thrift store glory and Weston King a testament to polyester, his sta-prest trousers featuring the sharpest crease in town. Launching, of course, into a divorce song, the weeping strains of faded love and regret parlayed by each on Unhappily Ever After set the scene for much of the evening’s entertainment, the pinnacle of the disharmony being a glorious rendition of There’s No Heart In This Heartache along with the somewhat redemptive I Know Longer Take Pride which has Dalgleish singing from the beyond to support her grieving husband. Performing as a duo tonight there was no sense that they needed a band behind them especially when they delivered the exotic rhythms of King Of The Carnival and there was even choreography as the pair danced to and from the microphones in step.

With no support act, the pair set out all their wares on stage tonight which meant the inclusion of several songs taken from their latest project where they delved into the country darkness they have exhumed from the songs of Elvis Costello. First off was a Costello song written with Loretta Lynn, I Felt The Chill Before The Winter Came, sung brilliantly in harmony, very much in keeping with the heartache which had come before and a reminder of how well My Darling Clementine have burrowed into Costello’s songbook. I Lost You and Either Side Of The Same Town just cemented this thought.

According to Dalgleish, Weston King has had the temerity to record an album of his own and this led to some inspired duelling dialogue before he was “allowed” to play two songs from The Struggle – The Hardest Thing Of All, a powerful description of solitude, along with his thoughts on a policeman duped by Trump on Weight Of The World. Dalgleish, bless her soul, weighed in on keyboards instead of leaving in a huff.

Of course, the pair revel in the comedy of the bickering – George and Tammy writ large on the stage. But when Dalgleish gets serious, responding to Wynette’s Stand By Your Man with her wife beating tale No matter What Tammy Said (I Won’t Stand By Him) with words such as “She’s seeing black and blue and purple because he’s seeing red,” in a rare onstage moment, she leans on Weston King affectionately. The pair are united when it comes to this.

Signing off with a great rendition of The Embers And The Flame, the duo announced they’d stay on stage for the encore, none of this false exit nonsense, and so, as the crowd bayed their applause they sang a grand version of Joe Henry’s You Can’t Fail Me Now. They would have ended there but an eruption from the crowd demanded more and so, an actual encore proceeded. Weston King dug into his past to bring up Endless Wandering Stars, a song inspired by a James Joyce line in Ulysses (“on page three” he said, he’d never got beyond that page). It was a delightful end to a hugely entertaining night.

Baskery. V: End Of The Bloodline.

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The three sisters, Greta, Stella and Sunniva Bondesson, who comprise Baskery, last released an album in 2018, Coyote And Sirens, and toured extensively in support of the album. Originally from Sweden, the trio by then lived in three different countries and when it came time to record a follow up album they were hamstrung by the Covid lockdown. Unlike many other artists who resorted to remote recording the sisters bided their time, each using their enforced isolation to write their own songs. Come the time it was safe again to mingle, they worked up the songs and decamped to Devon to record V: End Of the Bloodline with Sean Lakeman (The Levellers, Imelda May, Equation, Billy Bragg) in the producer’s seat. The sisters had met him when they toured with his brother Seth Lakeman and Seth appears on two of the songs here, playing viola.

Harking back to the coyotes named in the previous album, this disc is quite feral with the sisters rattling out of the traps on many of the songs. The most ferocious is Miss America which is whipped along with healthy doses of slide guitar and rattletrap percussion allowing the trio to sound like a love child of Tom Petty and The Violent Femmes. The opening song, Wolf Hook, while not as wild, finds them prowling in a southern swampish style with just the merest hint of Fleetwood Mac voodoo in its veins.

At times the band veers just a little too close to Stevie Nicks’ like chanteusing but they never fully fall into that trap. Little Lonesome Hate (with Seth Lakeman joining in) is a fully fledged slice of Child like balladry with the sisters playing excellently as the song takes flight while A Little Goes A Long Way is suffused with California power pop guitar. They close the album with some excellent sisterly harmonising on the rather gorgeous Birds Of Passage.

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Tom Heyman. 24th Street Blues. Bohemian Neglect Recording Works

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Back in 2012 Chuck Prophet released Temple Beautiful, his hymn to his hometown of San Francisco. It was a bright and vibrant record with many of the songs remaining highlights of his live set. Now, just a little over ten years later, Tom Heyman, a one-time member of Prophet’s Mission Express band records his experiences of San Francisco on 24th Street Blues, a decidedly lower key effort which is less focussed on past events and more in tune with the city’s denizens who are, in the main, worlds removed from the hi-tech industries which the city is primarily associated with now.

The 12 songs here are rough hewn, appropriate enough for the subject matter. Heyman, accompanied in the main by just a couple of collaborators (primarily Rusty Miller and Mike Coykendall) prowls through the songs, sweetening some of them with his sublime pedal steel guitar but never losing sight of the gritty reality he’s singing about. His characters are the jobbing day to day folk, those displaced by gentrification, those scrabbling to make ends meet. He follows in the footsteps of Jack London and Jack Kerouac, writers who could make San Francisco come to life on the page and who, like Heyman here, celebrated the daily grind.

The centrepiece of the album is the powerful The Mission Is On Fire, a grim song delivered in a dark and ominous manner. Inspired by a disastrous fire in the Mission District which claimed a life (Mauricio Orellana, to whom the album is dedicated) and displaced more than 60 residents, the site is now earmarked for a multi million redevelopment. Heyman’s anger and despair here is almost palpable as he just about spits out the refrain, “The Mission is on fire and some people are getting rich.”  However, it’s the lack of outrage after the inferno which fuels Heyman on the delicate following song Quit Pretending.

The album opens with the folky refrains of the title song with Heyman cleaving to a simple day in the life in San Francisco before bewailing the glowering cranes set to redevelop the city. Desperate is a more personal song (which is revisited at the end of the album) which finds Heyman seeking for a balm, presumably leading to his sojourn in San Francisco where he has found himself (and his wife) surviving in a somewhat bohemian music minded community.

There’s a brace of songs which paint portraits of youthful ambitions and failed promises. Mike Coykendall’s 12 string guitar adds a slight Byrds’ like sense to the story of Barbara Jean while Sonny Jim is given a slinky, somewhat cocksure strut. Much more sombre is the tale of a juvenile pair who deal drugs and run away on Hidden History. He’s banged up and by the time he’s out, she’s married with kids, another dream killed dead. Heyman nails this song which comes across like an Elmore Leonard story set to a lonesome pedal steel flavoured lament. And while Chuck Prophet’s ode to the Ford Econoline is a turbo charged driving song, Heyman drops into Steinbeck territory as his White Econoline is merely the mode to transport itinerant fruit pickers, today’s gig economy not much removed from those days of the Grapes Of Wrath. Back on a more personal note, Heyman delivers the most fully fledged rock’n’folk song here on Searching For The Holy Ghost which finds him accepting his lot as a citizen of San Francisco, in love with its romance and history and still settling in.

24th Street Blues is available in various formats including a package which includes the disc alongside a very handsome songbook with lyrics, music notation and illustrations by Heyman’s partner, Deidre White. See all options here.

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