Monica Queen: CCA, Glasgow – live review

Monica Queen
CCA, Glasgow
10th September 2022

Glasgow’s best kept secret, Monica Queen, lights it up in one of the City’s most  intimate venues.

If you’re not familiar with the name, you might be with the voice; that’s Monica Queen on Belle and Sebastian’s Lazy Line Painter Jane as well as the singer in much-missed Thrum (there’s a great bit of footage from C4’s The Word from back in the day on YouTube). Queen’s voice is one of the most ebullient and soulful things that’s ever came out of the City – why she’s not a national treasure remains a mystery.

There’s been a flurry of recent releases, too; the excellent Tenement and Temple album and this year’s set of (mostly) covers Stop That Girl, which features her partner and producer Johnnie Smillie and dapper man-about-town Douglas McIntyre, formerly of The Jazzateers and many others. There’s a bit of a theme through the album; Orange Juice covered Subway Sect, who are both in turn covered by Monica and band. Vic Godard and band were a huge influence (as well as Buzzcocks, Jonathan Richmond and the ubiquitous Velvet Underground) on the Postcard Records and wider Glasgow pre-indie/post-punk scene so it’s all quite fitting.

Tonight is about letting loose, though; they had played a show earlier today at a charity event as an acoustic duo but this is full-band and intimate tonight and with a seated audience in a venue that record company Last Night From Glasgow have adopted in recent months as something of a home-from-home. The last time I saw a band in here was actually the recently reformed Restricted Code in the early eighties, so it’s been a while. I also bump into local legend James King in the foyer, who is looking trim and svelte.

With ex-God-fearing Atheist Bob Anderson on drums, bassist Rory McGregor, and keys and accordion covered by Allan Hewitt, the band are a tightly-drilled unit. Johnnie jokes about Monica’s double denim jeans-and-waistcoat outfit before treating us to a burst of a Status Quo riff, setting the tone for the laid-back, relaxed setting. Opening with the album’s title track, Subway Sect’s Stop That Girl, Queen’s voice is a wonder; it’s not one of those five-octave range jobs used by the divas of the pop world at every juncture; it’s swooping, soaring, gentle and empowering in equal measures. There’s a brief between-song moment when she fills in a “technical difficulties” gap in the set by singing Amazing Grace almost acapella which is utterly and equally heart-stopping and jaw-dropping.

With a gloriously buoyant A Ripa and elongated version of the old Orange Juice song Dying Day with some tripped-out guitar from Smillie keeping the audience enraptured, the band look to be having the time of their lives. It’s a fairly short set but it’s just perfect. The Queen is dead; long live The Queen.

Monica Queen’s new album Stop That Girl is out now on Last Night From Glasgow.

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All words by Joe Whyte, you can find his author’s archive here

Source: louderthanwar.com