Benjamin Garrett, aka Fryars performs a smooth, alternative electronic set and he is, not someone you would normally expect to open for the main act tonight.
With nice club sounds, mixed with nice string accompaniments and some nice vocals, with a catchy but reserved chorus, ‘Cool Like Me’ sounds great.
There is an eclectic mix here with some great songwriting sensibilities and humble lyrics.
The injustice tonight is the type of crowd he is performing in front of, as his mix of 80s/early 90s pop, EDM, club and indie can become quite lost, especially on his latest album Power, which is an experimental sci-fi concept album.
However, Fryars sounds great live and the more club-based tracks are highly enjoyable, some great material and a nice live performance.
Back on the music scene, half a decade after retiring from music due to her failed attempt into the fashion industry, Lilly Allen has touched down on Glasgow soil for her first UK live show and she still epitomises everything that is wrong with the vapid pointlessness of the popular “Saturday-night-ITV-monstrosity”, that seems to taking a strong-hold and homogenizing the populace into something akin to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
A recent mother to two daughters, aged one and three, the 29-year-old adorns the stage with brightly coloured pinks and reds and lights shaped like baby milk bottles.
This seems like a minor subtlety to set the record straight that she can still be a pop star as well as a mother of two… edgy stuff.
She has got plenty of crass anecdotal three-minute jingles to offer the crowd, and the anomalous mix of teenage girls and thirty-plus woman seem to lap it up, waving their arms perpendicularly in appraised acceptance.
Allen is particularly honest, and in no way holding back any information, with tracks from her new album Sheesus.
“This next song’s about where I come from,” breaking in to the anachronistic sounding ‘LDN’, which is actually pretty good in a reminiscent sense.
“This one’s about my husband and his staying power in the sack,” before abusing our ears with ‘As Long As I Got You’.
Furthermore, before shooting into another song from new album Sheesus titled ‘Close Your Eyes’, Allen offers a rather graphic piece of information, in her completely poetic sensibility, stating: “this is about having sex after having a baby, it’s really weird, but everything’s fine now, so don’t worry”.
It’s a class act, and what you would have come to expect from Allen by now.
Every song is thickly coated in a hefty amount of sugar-strapped self indulgence, like categorising everybody who is out to get her as “people sitting at home on a laptop trying to make other people feel bad,” adding that “they probably have an avatar of Harry Styles,” before playing the superbly titled new track ‘URL Badman’.
‘Fuck You’ is a highlight tonight, with diplomacy of the utmost importance here, with Allen earnestly reminding us “there’s still a bunch of cunts around trying to fuck things up.”
Musically there is a lot of fun to be had and most of the material is jovial enough, however things like singling out photographers in the pit and showing off her belly, stopping between songs to single out people in the crowd and getting them chucked out of the venue and finishing with a cover of Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’, all add up to everything that is wrong with celebrity culture, mashing together with, and tainting, the music industry.
Also, Allen’s honesty and inability keep some of her more extreme points of view to herself, do her no favours, especially when she is waxing lyrical in her songs about being a so-called “victim” of media hounding.
Unfortunately you get what you give, and this is exactly the case with some of tonight’s antics.
Jovial music with an overbearing Allen just doesn’t cut it tonight.
Lilly Allen does seem to be back in fashion at the moment though, and that’s were she wanted to be, right?!
Words: Derek Robertson
