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.
