Live Review: Paolo Nutini, Liam Gerner

Half the crowd were Scottish and the other half wished they were. Brogues and swoon were the themes of the chatter that rippled across the packed Enmore Theatre Tuesday night, chatter that emerged whenever Paolo Nutini wasn’t belting out a sustained scream to the heavens or crooning about love gained or lost. So the crowd was mostly quiet then, as it turns out.

Liam Gerner and band put on an admirable, honest performance for a slowly growing crowd, which was really only there to see one guy.

Nutini covered good amounts of material from his three studio albums. Newbie, Caustic Love, his first as part of a collaborative songwriting project, didn’t get as much of a reaction from the crowd, which isn’t to say it wasn’t good stuff, while the beefier, more band-driven tunes made good use of the ten-piece band, with the brass section punctuating Nutini’s raspy cries with matter-of-fact blasts. The epileptic lighting, which was pleasant if a little distracting, kicked into overdrive when a song wasn’t quite hitting home. Endearingly out of time blasts of the ceiling lighting convinced everybody to clap along if ever they were too busy talking about what song they wanted to hear next.

The set worked best when things slowed down, the lighting following suit, casting a single spotlight on Paolo, who offered some earlier classics, among them Coming Up Easy, ramping it up a notch for Jenny Don’t Be Hasty and back down again whenever the fuck he wanted.

A big indicator of popularity is persuasion justified by confidence earned. Nutini has it in droves. If he wanted the audience to do something, they did it willingly, not awkwardly.  He’d often sing with his arms outstretched, as if to say “I’m everything”, and to some of these people (especially the considerable number who looked like they were going to try and cash in their relationship hall-pass after the show) for that moment, he was.