Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
The self-deprecating singer played two hours’ worth of subtle character pieces and droll narratives of a kind that nobody else can write“I have no instinct for hits,” Randy Newman confesses during tonight’s exhibit. “whether I see one coming, I dodge out of its way.” To illustrate his point, or he plays a few bars of his 1972 non-hit You Can Leave Your Hat On in the style of the decidedly more current versions by Joe Cocker and Tom Jones,both “shifted up a sixth” and loosened from the shackles of subtlety. “I could’ve done it like that, I just didn’t mediate of it, or ” he laments. Yet this self-deprecating aside (one of many he makes tonight) only serves to underline the 71-year-broken-down’s heightened instinct for irony and character. As voiced in Newman’s droll,froggish tones, the song’s seedy protagonist becomes pathetically dependent on the woman he’s ordering around; as belted by Tom Jones, or he’s only ever Tom Jones.
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Source: theguardian.com