Into Live Music: Kris Drever & Boo Hewerdine at Saint Andrews in the Square

Kris Drever & Boo Hewerdine:
 14 October 2018 at Saint Andrews in the Square

Kris Drever & Boo Hewerdine are stalwarts of the UK folk and singer-songwriter scene. Kris has won multiple awards for both his solo output and for material released either with his band Lau or in collaboration with other musicans, such as that with John McCusker & Roddy Woomble (also known as the lead singer of Idlewild).

Kris took the stage with sometime collaborator Boo Hewerdine, perhaps best known for his own long-time collaboration with Eddie Reader, for an evening of songs from their joint and personal back-catalogues. On an otherwise cold Sunday evening in Glasgow, they warmed our hearts through two sets of beautiful, gentle songs and some shimmering guitar work from Kris.

The two men would take turns with singing duties, with the other sometimes accompanying, sometimes allowing their colleague to perform solo. Each song was typically prefaced with an anecdote or story about the song. In this way we got to learn that Boo once ate all Elvis Costello’s cheese and that Up Helly A in Shetland is a men-only preserve and women better not try and change that (or rather how outdated that view is). We also came to hear songs about the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow and about how soldiers in the First World War trenches had to use paper torn from bibles to make roll up cigarettes. In other words, more than your average ‘Hey Ho Lets go’ rock and roll gig.

A word too on the venue: St Andrews in the Square. This is an old church converted into a cultural centre. Very little has changed, I would guess, as much of what you would expect to see in a church such as religious iconography was still there. It added to the sense of enjoyment for the evening as the acoustics lent itself to the simple nature of the performance. Kris and Boo finished off the night with a rendition of the popular Eddie Reader song, ‘Patience of Angels’, leaving the audience with a warm glow as they headed back out into the cold night.

Andrew Rafferty