(Mostly) Edinburgh gig reviews

The grand but intimate setting of The Queen's Hall is our venue tonight. Despite claiming on its literature to be "The HQ of live music" the QH is terribly underused for this kind of performance, more used to string quartets and the like. This is a pity. As the floor and balcony pack out the overall impression is of a band on at a friend's house, albeit a friend who is a minor member of the aristocracy who is none too fussy about whom he invites as guests.
Support band My Latest Novel play gentle and almost ethereal little tunes, but their moments of beauty are undercut by the singer's inpenetrably thick scottish accent. Good stuff all told but the crowd are tolerant rather than enthusiastic.
Enthusiastic they get however as The Delgados wander out onto the strains of Nancy and Lee's 'Some Velvet Morning.' The Chnemikal Underground lynchpins have become almost indie gods and are clearly and visibly chuffed about it. From the first it is evident that the band are among friends here, with inbetween song patter in abundance, mostly concerning the football game running concurrent with tonight's gig. And sure, they occaisionably duff things up, they laugh, we laugh, it doesn't matter.
And it really doesn't. because shining through the glitches and the joshing is some fantastically good indie pop. The band switch easily between guitar-based tracks from latest album Universal Audio to earlier, string-laden work, with real strings, and even to some acoustic versions of their songs easily. Above all, they had as much fun as the crowd tonight, which was a lot 5/5