Gallagher needs new songs for more morning glory
Music
Someone should give
Gallagher advice on managing that setlist. Old Oasis numbers tended to arrive as double-headers, carried by both his vocal, still a confrontational roar, and a crowd in rowdy, fist-pumping thrall to them, from a spiky Morning Glory to a thunderous D’You Know What I Mean? and truly jubilant Slide Away.
Yet this meant the new songs arrived in two big blocks. You could tell when they were being played, because mobile phones in the crowd were used for texting rather than filming, and the sweaty crush eased considerably. Not all of them deserved that. Greedy Soul was an enjoyably fast and rhythmic rocker and I Get By sharp pop-rock.
The rest, however, came across like Oasis imitations, and we are reaching photocopies of photocopies of photocopies at this stage, unable to match those originals.
Perhaps the studio versions will have more flair, but there was a sluggish acoustic-led number in Bold, mild psychedelia with Paper Crown, and one that already seems earmarked for a blustery album finale in Universal Gleam, desperate to be epic.
It had nowhere near the power of the unaccompanied Live Forever that provided an emotive encore.
Gallagher’s still a big presence, but he needs new songs to match it. brimstone minister (George Drennan, a monumental pillar of moral rectitude).
If the initial feel of the piece is quite light and skittishly funny, with Morna clashing merrily with the zealously upright minister’s wife (Pauline Knowles, dutifully drab in tweeds and woolly beret), the plot ventures into more serious and intrinsically controversial territory when Morna falls for her headmaster and marries him. Angus Headmaster is so smitten by Morna’s vivid energy, he almost shakes off the behavioural constraints imposed by his brother, the minister but – and Chris Forbes makes this dilemma powerfully convincing – he has grown up in the ways of Munst, and they’re not the ways of free-thinking 80s woman like Morna.
Taking humorous pops at the shibboleths of a Kirk that counters modern laissez-faire attitudes might seem easy or indeed cheap, but this cleverly written mini-musical is really more about the mechanics of patriarchial power and control than it is about religious faith. You get the full force of that globally relevant confrontation in some great songs – the outstanding cast double up as a live band
– and in Ken Alexander’s crisp direction that steers clear of caricature while giving the comedy a realistic bite.
Theatre