Please note, due to unforeseen circumstances this concert has been postponed and a new date will be arranged with Findlay in due course.
As defined in the title of his remarkable 2015 solo debut VIP: Very Interesting Persons (No.2 in the Daily Telegraph’s top folk albums that year), Scottish singer-songwriter (and sometime stand-up comic) Findlay Napier emphatically commands musical VIP status.
Co-written and produced by revered UK songsmith Boo Hewerdine, VIP’s ten biographical tracks, invoking real-life sources from Hedy Lamarr to a cave-dwelling Scottish tramp, marked another career high for Napier, building on plaudits and awards for his previous line-ups Back of the Moon, Queen Anne’s Revenge and The Bar Room Mountaineers.
He now turns those same supreme songwriting and storytelling gifts, allied with magpie-minded imagination and truly magnificent vocals, to his adoptive home town, on VIP’s hotly anticipated follow-up, Glasgow.
Continuing his collaboration with Boo Hewerdine, the new album combines freshly-penned originals with classics and rarities from Glasgow’s vast and colourful ballad canon, by authors as diverse as Hamish Imlach and The Blue Nile. Together, they form an extended musical love-letter to Scotland’s metropolis, celebrating 20 years since Napier first arrived as a student, swapping his idyllic Highland childhood home for the 14th floor of the city’s notorious Red Road flats.
As well as calling himself a folk singer, Napier simultaneously aspires to another, likewise timeless role: “I do love that old-fashioned, all-round idea of an ‘entertainer’ - I think it’s a brilliant thing,” he says. “But then that’s totally what the best folk singers are; they’ll have you in absolute hysterics in between punching you in the gut - people like Loudon Wainwright, John Prine, Michael Marra: that’s the absolute pinnacle, as far as I’m concerned.”
In 2016 Napier launched the Glasgow Songwriting Festival, a weekend of workshops and performances which completely sold out its inaugural outing, and returns in 2017: featured artists to date include Karine Polwart, Emma Pollock, aforementioned Louis Abbott and Stanley Odd MC Dave Hook. In between putting the finishing touches to Glasgow, Napier also toured in spring 2017 with acclaimed contemporary protest-song showcase Shake the Chains ("Eclectic and adventurous......a classy affair"
4 **** The Guardian)
“Songcraft and wit in the Difford & Tilbrook tradition” (Sunday Herald)
“Michael Marra meets Elvis Costello. . . Napier oozes class” (Folk Radio UK)
“A beautiful amalgam of Scottish soul, funk and folk” (Irish American Times)
“More rock’n’roll than 50 shitty indie bands” (BluesBunny)
“Weird” (Sunday Mail)
Acclaimed Scottish singer songwriter Findlay Napier performs his stirring rendition of Hamish Imlach's legendary Glasgow song 'Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice.