This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.
Emma Pollock
Oran Mor, Glasgow
****
A founding member of the Delgados and Glasgow indie label Chemikal Underground, Emma Pollock is also an abundantly gifted singer-songwriter with four solo albums to her name. The latest, Begging The Night to Take Hold, was released last month, a mere nine years after its predecessor.
During this gently bewitching and rather wonderful performance, Pollock explained matter-of-factly that life - and COVID - got in the way of her releasing any new material. It was worth the wait.
Accompanied on stage by cellist Pete Harvey and pianist/bassist Graeme Smillie, she delivered a set mostly comprised of songs from the new album, all of them wreathed in the sparse, baroque chamber-pop style that's been her hallmark ever since the Delgado days.
But whereas those songs were often quite lyrically oblique, her new material is distinctly personal. When you reach a certain age, she told us, you become more comfortable with an autobiographical approach to songwriting. Hence tender odes to her parents such as Pages Of a Magazine, in which she recalled childhood daytrips with her mother, an avid reader of aspirational British women's periodical The Lady.
Pollock is funny, too. A gregarious performer, her between-song chat included an amusing anecdote about facing a tough crowd (in Cambridge of all places) and her brief stay in rural Scotland, near where she grew up, to conjure up memories and write some songs for the new album. After 48 hours she couldn't wait to get home to Glasgow: "Everything shuts at four and it's boring as f*ck."
The trio also treated us to a cover of John Cale's Paris 1919, a song ideally suited to their dusty twilight library stylings.
Hopefully we won't have to wait so long for another return visit.
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