What’s startling about hearing Texas play a career-spanning set is realising quite how many awfully good songs Sharleen Spiteri and Johnny McElhone have written together. They might have spent much of their career as the epitome of drive-time music, but you don’t get to tour your greatest hits around arenas after 35 years unless those songs are pretty indelible.
There’s a strong sense that Texas may have had many of the same records in their collections as other bands who emerged from the west of Scotland in the 1980s, but chose to pursue success rather than indie purity. Songs as insistent and hook-laden as I Don’t Want a Lover, Summer Son and Say What You Want are undeniable: the latter as good a summation of the Hi Records sound as the band’s cover of Al Green’s Tired of Being Alone, which Spiteri says was the spur that pushed them towards a more soulful sound.
A pity, then, that the kick drum is so high in the mix it overwhelms any song with delicacy. When the band are playing uptempo and straight down the line it’s fine, but the more soulful they try to be, the more invasive the kick drum gets, a huge thud that drowns out everything else.
That’s a shame, because there’s so much else about the show to enjoy. It’s not just the songs, good though they are, because Spiteri is an inspired frontperson – her voice remains fantastic and she’s a wildly amusing presence, gently upbraiding a man who calls her “a legend” for diminishing language, re-creating stage tricks she learned from Justin Hawkins of the Darkness, and peppering every sentence with obscenities. A future on TV awaits if she ever has enough of music.
It’s a two-hour set that doesn’t feel like two hours – well paced, and with big hits spaced throughout – and leaving the acoustic segment until late, so they can finish off with the biggest bangers. But just imagine how good it might have been were it not for the jackhammer kick drum turning everything into Slipknot writ small.
