Cally Beaton "Namaste Motherf*ckers" Tour, St Lukes, Glasgow. Tuesday 7th April, 2026.

It's rare for me to have read the book before seeing the film. It's even rarer to have read the book of a comedy show in advance of the gig. I now wish I hadn't, so the jokes would have been fresher. Having ploughed through the book (part memoir/ part self-help), I suspected this show might not be for me, but I'd already bought the tickets. We still went, as my wife is the perfect demographic for this material. Why shouldn't she have a laugh for a change?

Cally posts amusing reels on social media about funny incidents in her life, usually at the expense of a mansplaining idiot, but occasionally about her perimenopausal symptoms. She also has a lovely dog called Jeff. She's been a corporate high-flyer, a single mum with two kids, and, latterly, a comedian. 'Her' crowd are like-minded women of a similar age, or older, accompanied by their husbands and partners. The audience felt similar to that of a feminist rally, only with fewer placards and more jokes. Or have drinky-poos over lunch with their girlfriends, speaking in loud voices because what they have to say is so important (while overcompensating for their feelings of invisibility).  

The show wasn't due to start till 8.30 pm, so we began our evening with dinner at the restaurant attached to the venue. My wife had the macaroni and cheese, and I ordered spare ribs, one of tonight's specials. When it arrived, I did wonder if they couldn't have spared any more (two fatty ribs, neatly posed on top of one another). As portion sizes go, there was more meat on the brownie I had for dessert, and a higher fat content. That said, it was delicious and more filling than expected.

When we've finished dining, the doors to the hall are already open. I get antsy and want to go in. My wife wants to know why we need to rush. We don't want to sit at the front. I remark, "But what if those seats are the only ones left?" I sense her eyes roll as we enter to find less than half the seats taken. We sit in the fourth row.

The stage is adorned with a high table displaying Cally's book, a white grand piano and a lounge chair with a low table, blessed with various books. The background lighting tastefully matches the pink and green of her book cover. The pre-show music includes women-empowering tunes like She's Electric by Oasis, Female of the Species by Space, and What a Feeling by Irene Carr. Cally was once an exec at MTV, so it's apt she also has Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles on her playlist (it was the first video they ever played).  

Cally starts the show in a typical MC fashion, getting to know the crowd, establishing who is local and who has travelled from afar. Full-on Fiona in the front row is game for a chat, the older woman revelling in the attention, even when it's not directed at her. Gordon, in the row in front of me, takes one for the men's team, with Cally referring to him whenever her punchline involves a male figure.  

So far, so okay.

When she moves onto her material, I get a sense of déjà vu. Most of the references are lifted directly from the text, but she's amiable and amusing and knows how to deliver a line. The darker the joke, the bigger the laugh she gets. The Andrew Mountbatten material didn't go down this well in Windsor, she says. 

She opens the second half by murdering Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the piano. Not in a Les Dawson comically awful way, but the number of bad notes would have filled a dossier on mansplaining. She then spends most of the second half sitting down, reciting sections from her "Times-bestselling" book (available from the Waterstones merch stand at the back, signing to follow). She closed with a recital of the complicated Debussy piano piece, Doctor Gradus ad Parnassus, that she originally mastered as an eleven-year-old, but had to relearn over forty years later.

Afterwards, I asked my wife how much she enjoyed the show, as she hadn't read the book. Her response was lukewarm. 

I thought the same. It felt like a book tour with jokes and crowd work. Who am I to complain, though? I'm only a man. 

Ticket Price (x2 tickets): £42.00 & Booking fees £2.46 = £44.46 from MBC Tours & Specials

 

A Thousand Horses, St Lukes, Glasgow. Wednesday July 30th, 2025

Six of us headed into Glasgow to see These Wicked Rivers. They weren't the headliners, and it did feel odd justifying the expense of seeing them play as a support act, having already caught them twice this year, but they are damn good. 

As they were again tonight. They played a tight setlist on a cramped stage and sounded great.

I'd never heard of headliners, A Thousand Horses. I'd listened to their album and figured the night would be about line dancing, cowboy hats and slide guitars. Boy, was I wrong! For the first two numbers, they sounded more like Oasis than Nashville. The singer's posture at the mic wasn't as pronounced as Liam Gallagher's, but there's definitely an influence. Only when the guitarist brought out his slide did it feel like we were veering into country mode.

They are a good band, but tonight they got strangled by the sound in the venue. Everything was too loud. Rather than turning down the bass and drums, they turned up the vocals and the guitar till it produced feedback. I wasn't the only one holding my ears during some of the songs. Which is a shame because they rocked. 

I thought I was dreaming when they started playing the opening bars to Champagne Supernova, then actually sang it. I hadn't been wrong about the Oasis influence after all. The singer was even dancing like Liam, bopping across the stage to the beat. The only thing missing was the parka. I liked the singer. He had a commanding presence, a likeable charm, with a Brad Pitt vibe about him. Shame I couldn't hear his vocals clearly.

They didn't play a long set, just under an hour and a half, but they did spend lots of time afterwards meeting the fans, as did These Wicked Rivers. 

Crowdwise, two individuals drew my attention (I won't go into Scott's sniggers and chattiness, because he can't always help it). The first was a young lad in a baseball cap near the front. He liked to raise his arm and take videos, not of the entire song and not always pointing the camera at the band. Every time I saw his wrist appear, with more bracelets than hair, I wanted to take him aside and give him a lecture on how to shoot a video. He enjoyed himself, though.

The second irritation was a well-to-do couple who stole the space in front of us during the interval. They were in their fifties and were ruthless as f@ck. Evident from her enthusiasm towards the band, she wanted to be at the front but hadn't arrived early enough. That wasn't going to stop her, though. She had moves and didn't care whose view she blocked. We weren't her only victims. One man went to the bar, and the pair immediately claimed his space. His wife complained to him upon his return that her view was spoiled, but there was nothing he could do. The woman tried it on again, dancing down to the front, putting her arms around a couple at the barrier before those behind called her out and she reversed away again, holding her hands up in surrender, still dancing. Cheeky bitch! 

Anyway, she didn't spoil my night. The venue's sound did that. It could have been so much better.

No setlists available at the time of writing.

These Wicked Rivers

Josie, TWR's manager, alone on the balcony

A Thousand Horses

After they stole the old man's space,
Before she danced to the front.

Meet and Greets

Ticket Price: £30 via Alan (he got them from TicketWeb) 

Marc Jennings, "Marc'sism", GICF, St Luke's, Glasgow. Monday 24th March 2025.

Before the gig, we went for dinner at the Winged Ox part of the venue, having booked a table in advance. The food was very good and not overly expensive. No desserts, though, so my wife and I had to kill time with conversation, additional drinks and much-needed trips to the loo.

With fifteen minutes before the doors were due to open, we made our way outside to find no queue. There were a few people hanging about the inside door, so we waited there. Slowly, the corridor filled to the point that no one else could enter. It was then that a rather sniffy steward informed us we should be queuing outside. Everyone decanted to join the four already there. It was no biggie, but perhaps an information sign or a team member could have sorted this out earlier. We still got good seats in the fourth row with an excellent sightline to the comedian. 

Monday nights are rarely good for comedy. The energy of the crowd can be low, so it needs a comedian at the top of their craft to make it work. I'd only ever seen Marc perform short routines online, so I was looking forward to seeing how good he was live. 

First up was Susan Riddell in the support slot. She peddled her familiar twenty-minute set about dating apps and relationships. She did well despite the audience's seeming muted reaction. It was funny when she couldn't find the exit door from the stage after her set. 

Headliner Marc, a Scottish comedian from Clydebank, has grown a large enough following to sell out the venue and add a second date at Blackfriars for the end of the Festival. He's also done well enough to have to pay tax on his earnings for the first time last year, he admits. He also comments on it being a Monday but hopes we still have a good time.

He was okay. There were no barnstorming routines, just funny jokes and observations, with perhaps a little too much reliance on the comic analogy. He covered topics like his desire to get on the property ladder, some bits on politics (with a nice Nicola Sturgeon joke), and some material about his family and what it means to be a man in today's society. Nothing overly deep, but still funny. 

Perhaps not his finest hour, but it was a Monday.

Ticket Price: £12.50 x 2
Service Fee £5.12
Delivery Fee £2.00
Total Payment £32.12 from TicketWeb.

The Big Fab Comedy Show with Larry Dean, St Lukes, Glasgow. Sunday 19th May, 2024

The Gilded Balloon is running a series of these mixed-bill nights up and down the country over the year, but this was the one I wanted to see most. 

When we arrived, the evening was warm and sunny. There was no queue outside the venue, just people sitting on the stone blocks at the perimeter of the square. We found an empty one and settled down to wait. It wasn't too busy. More people arrived, some craftily sitting on the steps outside the front door. Then, at 7 p.m., a security person came out of the bar entrance to tell us the door was open. Not the front door. The side door, the one shared with the bar. 

We formed a disorderly queue and waited to get in. The girl behind me complained to her pal about how long it was taking. Then she mentioned needing to pick up her co-codamol from the chemist at 8.30 the next day, and my ears pricked up. 

The friend replied, "Aye, you've no been weel for ages."

"Aye, uh know. See, yesterday, my throat wiz like broken glass, but that went away, and noo it's aw slimy." She coughed loudly. "Gawd, ah sound like I smoke sixty fags a day." She coughed again, thick and guttural. Almost chewy, you might say.

"You've no been right since you had that sick bug."

"Food poisoning," she corrected. 

I whispered to my wife, "Let's not sit anywhere near them."

The queue took ages to move. Once we entered the building, we could see why. There were two queues: ours and the one from the bar. The security were being highly diligent in their bag searches. One located a gentleman's hip flask, which was set aside. Another refused to let a girl in with her metal water bottle, its contents decanted in a clear pint tumbler before she could have it back. The message: no fluids in the performance space unless purchased from the venue or you're not getting in.

We didn't have bags, so we were waved through after the ticket barcodes were scanned. Inside, half of the seats were already taken. Most of the bar queue must have gotten in first. No worries. We found two seats near the middle and settled in. Smoke hung in the air as if someone had earlier forgotten to switch off the smoke machine. Not so thick that you couldn't see the stage, but enough to make the view hazy.

I had no idea when the show would start, but when my wife asked, I suggested 8 p.m. She was fizzing. "You're telling me it isn't going to start till 8 o'clock? Why did we need to be here at 6.30?"

"Unreserved seating. Look how busy it is already. You don't want to end up with a crap seat with a restricted view."

She pulled that face that told me she couldn't see past the guy in front.

"Do you want to swap seats?" I asked.

"No. I'm fine. So long as you can see."

It turned out the show started at 7.30.

Jay Lafferty did a great job getting us warmed up in her role as compere, getting to know the crowd, explaining the format of the night and setting down the house rules. 

The first act was Josie Long, fresh off the minibus from the South Side, where she now lives. Her voice was more croaky than usual, and she needed to refer to her notes occasionally, but she was still top-class, a mixture of passion and positivity and plenty of fun.

Next up was Sam Lake. I saw him support Ed Gamble, and he used a lot of the same material tonight. It killed even more this time. He ploughs the same catty tropes as other gay comedians, but his writing and delivery are sharp. It won't be long before he breaks through into the mainstream media.

After the break, local act Stephen Buchanan performed his set. I'd never seen him before. I felt he was the weakest act of the night, but only because the others were so good. His material was funny, but the others got bigger laughs. 

Headliner Larry Dean was immense. Oozing oddball charisma, his material shone. It didn't even feel like a set. He was just plucking funny out of the air. I do realise everything about it was scripted, even down to his posture and facial expressions, but at the time, the big laughs rolled through the audience. I'm really looking forward to catching him again later in the year. 

Jay rounded off the night with a story about the consequences of an inappropriate children's party gift and the subsequent parents' WhatsApp group chats. A hilarious tale in the telling, where the punchline wasn't the funniest bit.

We were all done by 10.30.

Having avoided the sixty-fags-a-day cough lady, I got my comeuppance when the bloke on my left spent half the night coughing into his shirt's right elbow. It should have been incinerated afterwards as a potential biohazard. I better not get ill before my holiday.

Ticket Price: £25 (plus fees) from TicketWeb.  

GUN, Intimate Hombres Album Launch Show. St Luke's and the Winged Ox, Glasgow. Friday 26th April, 2024

It was my mammy's birthday today, so I took the day off to take her out for lunch. I won't tell you what age she was, but she has more wrinkles on her face than she has years. 

Then, because I'm getting old, too, I had to have an afternoon nap in preparation for tonight's gig. I did manage to set up and test my new subwoofer before I left, so the afternoon wasn't a complete bust. 

GUN were playing two shows at St Luke's tonight after the first gig sold out. This meant the second show was pushed to start later than originally scheduled. We arrived around 7.45pm for an 8pm doors open, with GUN due on stage at 9pm. The queue was fairly long, already stretching as far as the pavement. Not as long as the queue at the Barrowland for Rob Lambertini ( a popular George Michael tribute act), though. 

I didn't get frisked on the way in, so my initial concerns about having to explain why I was wearing a back brace were unfounded. It was just as well, as I later discovered I had a pair of scissors in my back pocket from when I opened the speaker's packaging. 

As we got to the front of the queue, I overheard the couple in front being told there were seats available upstairs, so we went up, too. We sat on the centre pews at the back, close to the middle, with one pew in front and another behind. Signs on the wall behind the sound desk/VIP area indicated no standing was allowed there, so I figured our view would be fine.

Unfortunately, the people in the pews in front decided they would stand for almost the entire gig, so taking videos was out, and my snaps had to be mostly snatched from between their shoulders.

The lady on the right took umbrage with one cheeky chap when he stood in the corridor in front of her. She leaned across and prodded him on the shoulder, gesturing for him to bugger off. He apologised and sank to his knees to continue videoing the song on his phone from ledge level. Afterwards, when he turned to apologise again, she turned up her nose at him and then smirked at her pal. Not a nice person. I half expected her to breathe fire. She videoed almost every song in portrait but only partially, as if her attention span couldn't tolerate that amount of time.

Crouching Fan, Looming Dragon

GUN were on fire (as I'm contractually obliged to say as a lifelong fan). Actually, they were good, even from my seated position. The venue sound wasn't great, with a lot of distortion. It might have come across better from floor level.  

The band played a number of tunes from the new album, Hombres, as well as the crowdpleasers of old. The new songs are brilliant and earned their right to stay on the setlist for years to come. Dante's voice was a bit rough at times, having completed one set an hour earlier, but he still belted out the songs. I couldn't really make out the banter when Jules spoke because of his quiet mic, which was strange because, at times, the backing vocals almost drowned out Dante.

I stood for Shame On You, the last song before the encore, so I got a couple of uninterrupted snaps while singing my heart out. 

On the way out, I spied Pauline McNally, a former colleague, on the stairs opposite, but she didn't notice me waving (or my anonymity struck again). It's been a while. She still looks great. 

As we walked to the car, I asked my wife if she'd changed her mind about attending the Barrowland gig in December. She smiled. "Yes. I'd like to go. They were good." 

Praise indeed!

Before that, though, I get to catch them at the Maid In Stone Festival in Kent.

Setlist: 

Lucky Guy

Here's Where I Am

Don't Say It's Over

All Fired Up

Better Days

You Are What I Need

Boys Don't Cry

Falling

Take Me Back Home

Steal Your Fire

Shame On You

Encore:

Word Up! (Cameo cover)

Inside Out

Ticket Price: £18.50 inc signed CD (£15 for ticket only).

Official photographer working in our aisle.
I bet his snaps are better than mine.

"Take Me Back Home"

Jim Gellatly and Billy Sloan 

Admiral Fallow, St Luke's, Glasgow. Thursday, 5th December. 2019

There's always less energy in the room when a band plays new songs that have yet to be released. Admiral Fallow unveiled a number of new tunes last night but that was okay because the whole point of the gig was to raise enough money to record their new album. 

Support came in the form of Angie McMahon, an Aussie singer/songwriter who sings moderately sad songs (her description) while strumming an electric acoustic guitar. She has a quirky personality, appears a little shy but has a lovely, self-deprecating sense of humour and a sweet smile. Her speaking voice is like honey whereas her singing voice is deep and throaty, reminiscent of Chrissie Hynde and Florence Welch (of 'And The Machine'). Her songs were okay but didn't really warm up the crowd.

Prior to their performance, Admiral Fallow appeared on stage to tune their own equipment. It was that kind of gig. They hadn't toured in three years and admitted to being a bit rusty, especially showcasing new material. That didn't stop it being a fun gig. Louis Abbot is a great singer with a distinctive voice and the band are all accomplished musicians, changing instruments as the song required. I'm not sure if the new stuff is as good as the old ones but that could be down to unfamiliarity. 

    

I made the mistake of standing too close to the front. It became quite crowded and there wasn't a lot of wiggle room to get a better view when the tall people pushed their way forward. My photos weren't great partly because of my proximity to the stage and because of the smoke/lighting combination being used (either that of my new phone camera sucks).

One amusing highlight came at the start of the encore. As the band gathered to sing 'Four Bulbs', only accompanied by Louis on instrumental guitar, the music from the next door bar bled through loudly. They got on with it anyway and it was still a moving version.  

Overall, I'm glad I went. Gigs after work can sometimes be a drag but Admiral Fallow were good. I'm looking forward to their new album whenever it is ready.

     

Setlist

Sleepwalking

Electric Eyes

Subbuteo

Paper Trench

3 Weeks

Happened in The Fall

The Possibility

Tree Bursts

Dead Against Smoking

Squealing Pigs

Guest Of The Government

The Grand National, 1993

Evangeline

Salt

Tuesday Grey

Encore:

Four Bulbs

Old Balloons