Kirsten Adamson & The Tanagers

It looked like all of the East Neuk folkerati wafted into the Community Hall tonight like warmly welcome March blossom to lend an ear to Kirsten and the Tanagers. It feels like a special night, there’s a sense of promise in the air.

Perhaps it’s the packed stage of instruments, electric guitars, keyboards, acoustic guitars, even… drums! Most unusual. MC Tony notes the club’s full monicker… Crail Folk and Acoustic Music Club and wonders - given the plethora of electrical instrumentation on view - if Trading Standards might be sniffing about. Well, nothing’s going to stop a fully charged KA & the Ts tonight.

Kicking off with Stitches, Kirsten’s single from 2024, we’re firmly in country rock territory, and delightfully so. Twangy Strat from the exceptional Jon Mackenzie sets the tone. The band sound is bell-like clear, punchy and rockin’… we’re in for quite a night.

Andy Barbour joins on keys for Heart is Burning Blue from the new album Dreamviewer.

What begins to strike is not just the quality of the music but the quality of the lyrics, they feel so natural as if they were sitting in the aether waiting to be discovered rather than sweated out with a paper and pen, for example, in the song The Heart …

‘I have studied the heart, when it comes to love I don’t need a chart, I have studied the heart’.

So simple, but so perfect. AI couldn’t write that.

Dreamviewer, the song, is soft and delicious, Scott Forsyth eschews his drumsticks for pom-poms to heighten the song’s ethereal vibe.

Such is its groove, Slow Train has the band dancing around on stage and for Big Addiction Kirsten straps on a Rickenbacker and we take off for planet jangly - glorious, soaring country rock perfection.

To close the first set the band all come down off the stage and each with an acoustic guitar, Jon, Andy, Scott and Richard take a turn playing a solo… how can that be, they’re all great at the guitar, even the drummer!!

And, were that not enough, we were treated to a part 2… just as outstanding as the first.

Perfume, possibly my favourite song of the evening touches deep, a sad, slow country waltz…

‘Time to be Happy

Time to be Free

Time to forget, the bad side of me.’

A new song Better Than I Was features bassist Richard Anderson’s fine falsetto backing vocals.

River Someday builds and builds, tempts, teases then explodes into an all-out rocker.

But, hey, I could go on. The bottom line is that KA & the Ts are major league; all brilliant, versatile players, they have tunes and lyrics that really should be on heavy duty rotation on all the Nashville stations; glorious, uplifting music that touches the heart and gets the feet shufflin’. A perfect night.

Photos by Peter Salkeld, words by Callum MacLeod