Goodbye Mr Mackenzie

26th May 2019

The Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh

What should you do if you arrange a set of gigs to commemorate 30 years since the release of your debut album (indeed, it being your first live performances of any sort in over 20 years).....and the lead singer loses his voice days before the first is due?  Why, you simply bash on, of course.

For in what could easily be viewed as an ironic microcosm of the bad fortune which appeared to dog the band back in the day, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie’s vocalist Martin Metcalfe succumbed to a severe bout of laryngitis just prior to this short cluster of gigs around Scotland.  And with folks flying in, we learned, from the likes of Germany and Canada to attend, cancellation really was not an option

Metcalfe's voice this evening was...well, no getting away from it, pretty much a train smash.  Almost inaudible on some of the more raucous tunes, and an unrecognisable croak on those more sedate ones such as Candlestick Park and Jezebel.

Fortunately everyone in The Liquid Rooms appeared to know the lyric to each and every song word perfect, so were more than able (and willing) to help out when requested by the singer.  Which was often.

Metcalfe, after spending the Eighties and Nineties apparently wishing to be David Bowie, appears to have adopted some slightly unhinged Voodoo-Ringmaster persona.  And he certainly cut a striking figure as he skulked around the stage, like a Fagin looking for his misplaced Dodger in the crowd.

Martin Metcalfe

Rona Scobie

Big John Duncan

Marie Claire Lee & Fin Wilson

Goodbye Mr Mackenzie - Edinburgh 2019

I recall giving the Good Deeds and Dirty Rags album a tiny bit of a kicking, when I wrote about it in an earlier blog, and revisiting it before this gig I found little to change my mind.  Many of the songs are strong enough; it is just the renditions and production which sound so lacklustre.  As if the lads' and lassies' hearts were not really in it.  My assertion was borne out this evening, I felt, as songs like Open Your Arms, Wake It Up and Goodwill City thundered along as they most assuredly never did on vinyl.

And Good Deeds, even with Metcalf barely able to bark out those disturbing lyrics, was by a couple of degrees of magnitude more powerful than the anodyne rendition on the album.  

This evening, in addition to the whole of the DD&DR album, we were presented with a selection of b sides and lesser known tunes.  I was surprised neither Secrets nor Face to Face were performed, but less so that Amsterdam (even though it was named on the stage set list) was dropped.  The Brel composition really would have taxed Metcalfe's few remaining unshredded vocal chords to the limit.  

Here Comes Deacon Brodie though, had the place bouncin’ around, as did the main set closer The Rattler.  This last named truly is one of the great lost Scottish rock tunes.

The intensively annotated, yet oddly haphazard, set list.

I heard the M word mentioned twice during the evening from amongst the crowd; in both cases folks speculating whether Oor Shurlie would make an appearance, perhaps during the encores.  But that was never really going to happen, I feel.  The lady was only once referenced on stage - and even then rather obliquely by Big John Duncan during the band introductions; he asserting backing vocalist Marie Claire Lee had “big shoes to fill”.

It was good to see Big John on stage, he playing all of the set seated after hobbling on-stage on crutches which he triumphantly waved in the air, before tossing them aside.  The unfortunate chap has MS these day, I believe.

I note the band are picking up a few gigs down south in the Autumn before, what may or may not be, a final hurrah at The Barrowlands in December.  

Or did we witness here a Skids-like resurrection, I wonder?



Set list

Open Your Arms
Wake it Up
His Master's Voice
Goodwill City
Candlestick Park
Dust
You Generous Thing You
Good Deeds
Somewhere in China
Here Comes Deacon Brodie
Green Turn Red
Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie
The Rattler

Encore
Jezebel
The Way I Walk
Blacker Than Black
Now We Are Married

Goodbye Mr Mackenzie - Edinburgh 2019