The Pastels and Ela Orleans, The Glad Café, Glasgow, 1st September

There was a song I half-wrote once, which never got any further than:

I took a long vacation
In the wilds of the outback
And I may be mistaken
But I don’t think I’ll be coming back
’Cause there are birds and a sky
And a blue in your eye
And a truck on a trail
And a wind to set sail
So fuck these corporations

That last line capsized it, I must have had a particularly rubbish job at the time. The ‘truck on a trail’ bit was a Pastels reference, of course, and last night Stephen took a swipe at the indie rules of old by congratulating the audience for being enthusiastic about two slow songs in a row, in contrast to ’80s audiences, who would heckle even one slow song and demand ‘Truck Train Tractor’, indignant that they may not get a saleable high-octane bootleg out of the occasion. Tascam recorder in hand, obviously I had to shout out for ‘Truck Train Tractor’, but a slow, gentle ‘Boats’ demonstrated how bad an idea that would have been. The most extreme point of The Pastels’ journey into gentleness and calm was probably the 2007 set of ‘quiet music’ I wrote about for Tangents, best represented on record by the Two Sunsets LP. Since then there has been a definite re-introduction of a rock element to their music, with songs like ‘Night Time Made Us’ (an all-time favourite, and amazing last night) and ‘Wrong Light’. In the small back room of the Glad Café, they sounded fantastic, particularly on a rejuvenated and extended ‘Frozen Wave’, with Ela Orleans contributing some wild vocals (and, between songs, a hilarious non-apology about ‘coming over here, stealing your Pastels’). Another nice surprise was Katrina singing ‘Thru Your Heart’, her own song, but one Stephen usually sings.

Ela’s own set was beautiful too and, aside from ‘In The Night’, deliciously crisp and devoid of rock. In tone it was most like her Lost album, which is to say, song-based, rather than taking in the sonic tendrils and detours of her two double LPs. Her approach to sampling reminds me a little of Bill Wells, in that a repeated fragment can take on all kinds of colours and intonations from the sounds going on around it. It can also be far more sophisticated, but when used simply like this it is often at its most affecting, entwined with delay-heavy, plaintive vocals. It’s a great balance, and you wouldn’t want to be without either the intricate, curious explorations or the directness of a line like ‘I am lost without you’. It is going to be fascinating to see which direction she takes next.

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I didn’t take any photos, but plenty of other people did.