CityLife

Amy Macdonald

Amy MacDonald
Apollo
October 19, 2010

Amy MacDonald is a curious case. Her debut album This Is The Life sold well in excess of two million copies across the world, yet she remains a strangely unrecognisable figure, outdone in the fame stakes by nearly all her contemporaries.

Yet having a name people know but a face you couldn’t pick out of police line-up (probably the way she prefers it, to be fair) has done her no harm so far, with this the first night of her biggest tour.

New album A Curious Thing has picked up where her debut left off, and MacDonald certainly looks at ease on the stage.

She has an effortless Glaswegian charm about her, with an impenetrable accent that sounds like something off Rab C Nesbitt, and is chatty to a fault.

At various junctures between songs she exposes the band’s backstage activities (cups of tea and Don’t Forget The Lyrics on the telly), rails against the vanity of your stereotypical footballer’s wife (despite the fact she is engaged to Bournemouth striker Steve Lovell) and even compares Manchester to Glasgow because we’re ‘just as friendly and just as nuts’. I think it was meant as a compliment.

Her patter was reliably interesting, which couldn’t always be said for her mixed bag of a set.

Her Dolores O’Riordan-alike voice is proficient but no better, and her songs veer from enjoyable, Pretenders-lite rock-pop songs to plodding, meat-and-potatoes singer-songwriter dross.

A compellingly strident, impressively loud start soon gave way to some less-inspired numbers, and so it continued throughout the night.

For every lively, melodic Don’t Tell Me It’s Over, there is a song like Youth Of Today, written when she was just 15. It showed.

A solid enough set, then, but lacking in any real killer moments.
 

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