From the Times Online:
Link to original article.
It might be a cliché, but it’s also true: You really don’t know how fond you are of someone until they’re gone. Or, in the case of Edwyn Collins - back in action two years after a near-fatal stroke – nearly gone. By way of proof, the 300 people who filled this small West End theatre raised the roof as Collins, aided by a walking stick, gingerly made his way to the stool where he sat for the next hour. Loud cheers for what the sometime Orange Juice frontman had been through were only natural. But with yet a note to be played you wondered if, by the end, it would be just his bravery they were applauding.
As misgivings go, this one couldn’t have been more fleeting. It’s tempting to say that the Caledonian funk of Poor Old Soul was exactly as it sounded in 1981 when it first appeared on the fledgeling Postcard imprint. In fact, Collins’s band – which included his old Aztec Camera chum, Roddy Frame, and the former Ruts drummer, David Ruffy – invested the music with a joie de vivre that seemed to flush the place free of sentimentality. For his lean, adrenalised fretwork on Falling and Laughing and his protracted tremolo abuse on What Presence, Frame was a revelation doing the work that his friend had once been able to take care of himself.
With just the singing to concentrate on, Collins, now 48, stumbled slightly on the middle-eight of Orange Juice’s 1983 Top Ten hit Rip It Up, but then the concentration of words constituted a mouthful when he was in his twenties. Though more used to taking centre stage and playing his own songs, Frame seized upon the distinctive hooks and licks of the singer’s 1995 solo hit A Girl Like You in a manner that suggested he had been coveting them for years.
Only songs from Home Again – the album that Collins recorded but didn’t get around to releasing before his stroke – tapped into a more contemplative vein. In particular, the title track elicited a holy shiver, partly because of the beatific baritone conferred upon it by the singer and partly because the words unfurled from the stage like a present from the younger Collins to his future self: “I heard the guitars ringing/ And it brought me home again.”
It seems that Collins is even writing again. Not the wordy, worldly ruminations of yore but, in the case of Some Sweet Day, haiku-like hymns of gratitude to consciousness itself. In a pop year already heaving with reformations and resurrections, this was something else entirely.
Short of an intimate acoustic show by Lord Lucan, it was the comeback against which all comebacks must surely be measured.
