Live Review

Jesse Malin & The St. Mark’s Social – King Tuts, Glasgow

• 6th Dec 2010

Jesse Malin and his band, The St Mark’s Social, returned to King Tut’s for the second time in five months and served up another excellent show.

This one was being recorded for a live album, the choice of Glasgow showing Malin’s liking for the warm reception he has always enjoyed in the city.

Support band A Million Years were on their first visit to the UK. The Brooklyn based quartet were invited along by New Yorker Malin and played a lively set. Their guitar driven rock sound is a fairly standard one, but they were well received by a large crowd.

Jesse Malin and his band played for just short of two hours and every song was delivered with the characteristic intensity that leaves Malin soaked in sweat from early in the set. He is a natural frontman, telling stories and joking with the crowd between songs, comfortable in the spotlight.

The set opened, after a little false start that will surely be edited out, with Burning The Bowery, the first track from the recent album, “Love It To Life”. New songs and old were mixed together, with some fan favourites played especially for the live album.

Malin switched from his Les Paul to acoustic guitar for much of the show, running through Wendy and Queen of the Underground in frenetic fashion. Things were slowed down a little with a stunning cover of the Replacement’s classic Bastards of Young, with the King Tut’s crowd on backing vocals, before a hard rocking version of Brooklyn brought the temperature up once more.

The set was closed with Solitaire, with Malin taking to the audience as he often does. He performed the obligatory band introductions sitting with a beer in the middle of the crowd, who simply sat down beside him as if it was a perfectly natural way to end a rock show.

There had to be an encore and the band returned to play three more songs, featuring a fine version of Fairytale of New York. It was after midnight before the band eventually left the stage, well past the scheduled curfew, but no one at all was complaining.

Jesse Malin is quite simply a superb live performer. He combines showmanship with excellent music and is backed by a band that seems to have been playing together for years rather than the months that they have actually been together.

Glasgow is one of Jesse’s favourite places to play, and the live album that is to come from this show will demonstrate exactly why. I’m looking forward to it already.