Kiefer Sutherland

ABC, Glasgow

Glasgow loves its country music. And presumably its teen vampire flicks and tense real-time espionage thrillers too, because not since David Duchovny graced this stage 12 months ago has there been such eager curiosity to see a screen superstar out of water.

Lost Boys/24 star Kiefer Sutherland has donned stetson and turned his hand to raspy rootsy rocking in the last couple of years, and it transpires that he possesses a pleasingly gruff bluesy baritone, not a million miles away from Bob Dylan in its conversational phrasing.

Sutherland knows his genre. He had the good taste to sing his love of the outlaw country singers – Cash, Kristofferson, Haggard, Nelson – with his own pastiche number Shirley Jean and a barrel-load of drinking and misbehaving songs such as the mildly maudlin last dance of Not Enough Whiskey and the Allman Brothers-style heavy roots rocker Down in a Hole.

His songs are not spectacular – meaning that they could at least bear comparison with much that filters out of Nashville these days. But there was a ring of authenticity to his performance, which is either the product of writing from grim experience, or really good acting.

He filled out the rest of his set with a brace of credentialsestablishing covers, including Merle Haggard’s honky tonking The Bottle Let Me Down, Lone justice’ s ways to be wicked, Tom Petty’ s brawny rocker Honey Bee and Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, which he prefaced with a lovely story about his dad’s free-spirited approach to parenting.