“Boys and girls,” says Alan Nimmo as he surveys the crowd in
the middle of ‘Wait On Time’, “I was dreading this, with Paul Rodgers playing
doon the road. But you came here. Eejits!”
His concern was understandable, given that King King’s
audience surely draws on fans of Free and Bad Company. Would a bundle of them forsake Nimmo and co
for the night in order to see Rodgers do his ‘Free Spirit’ show at Glasgow’s
Armadillo (aka the Clyde Auditorium)?
In the event he needn’t have worried. King King have their own loyal fanbase these
days, and if the room isn’t jam-packed by the time they come onstage, it’s
still well busy.
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| Alan Nimmo - rigged for 'silent running' |
Wisely, they’ve freshened things up by shuffling the set
list, after focusing heavily on the King
King Live selection during recent tours.
Coming on to the audience belting out a rousing chorus of ‘Alright Now’
to their entry tape, they launch into ‘More Than I Can Take’, with previous
opener ‘Lose Control’ moved downstream to mid-set. Later, ‘Jealousy’ is rotated out of
proceedings in favour of another of the classic soulful moments from Standing In The Shadows, their exquisite
take on Free’s ‘Heavy Load’.
And in addition to the old, the borrowed and the blues, they
serve up something new with ‘She Don’t Gimme No Lovin’’, set to be the first single
from forthcoming new album. With a prickly guitar intro redolent of
AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’, it’s a radio-ready rocker that a horse racing pundit
might describe as “by Whitesnake, out of Thunder”. It’s a breezy affair, with a nifty key change
and nestling in the middle an opportunity for a fresh singalong in the future.
The lynchpins of the set continue to captivate though. The second number, ‘Wait On Time’, is an
effortless gear changer to get everyone moving.
With Wayne Proctor shuffling on drums, Lindsay Coulson strutting on
bass, and Bob Fridzema grooving away on organ, the Fabulous Thunderbirds track
is a slab of blues-funk they’ve made their own.
The crowd have the singing on ‘Rush Hour’ down pat nowadays,
while ‘You Stopped The Rain’ has become a veritable showstopper, with Nimmo
soaring away to wonderland on his vertiginous closing solo, drawing whoops of
appreciation at its conclusion.
Fridzema cooks up a new variation on his solo on ‘Long
History Of Love’, while Nimmo demonstrates that after a worrying six months his
vocals are back to full strength, especially
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| "It's time to let Bobby loose on you!" |
He’s not kidding when he sings “We’re gonna get funky” on
the intro to ‘All Your Life’. Get funky
we do. As danceable a rock track as you
could ask for, it still has its subtleties, with Proctor and Fridzema chopping
up the rhythm big time during the latter’s solo, while Nimmo contents himself
with holding down a tick-tock funk groove on guitar.
By the same token, the epic set closer ‘Stranger To Love’
doesn’t just feature Nimmo’s totemic ‘silent running’ guitar passage; as his
solo takes off again Proctor – the master of the booming drum sound – and
Coulson get up to all sorts of rhythmic shenanigans beneath it.
My other half was disappointed to find that the encore was
‘Waking Up’ rather than her favourite, the sunshine funk singalong of ‘Let Love
In’, and maybe she has a point. If they
felt in need of a change then there may be better candidates to round the night
off, like ‘Can’t Keep From Trying’ or ‘Crazy’, perhaps.
But hey, who cares?
Alan Nimmo appears to be operating at full throttle vocally again,
there’s a new album in the offing, and this show reaffirmed what we already
knew – as a live act, King King always deliver.
Let the good times roll!
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