Edwyn Collins reviewed: emotional final hometown concert capped by an Orange Juice reunion

“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

The buzz of expectant chatter in the auditorium turns to cheers as the room fills with the magnificent racket of The Mekons’ 1978 single, “Where Were You”, clattering out as intro music, and as a reminder of what was in the air back when all this started. Behind the stage, letters apparently stolen from the set of Elvis’s 1968 comeback special spell out E D W Y N. And now Edwyn Collins himself appears from the wings, walks slowly and determinedly to take the chair he will occupy for most, but not all, of the evening, and leans toward the mic.

“The Orange Juice days,” he says. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

And with that, with his sterling five-piece band l,ocking instantly into the circling, tumbling riff of “Falling And Laughing” and with emotions already running high, we’re off. One last time.

When, as it must, Hollywood gets around to making the big screen Edwyn Collins biopic, the scriptwriters will surely take poetic licence, tweak the pesky facts, and rewrite reality so that this Glasgow show becomes the final gig of this final tour.

Edwyn belongs to Glasgow

Sure, Edwyn was born in Edinburgh, where the last show of what’s billed as The Testimonial Tour: A Last Lap Around The UK is actually scheduled to occur, at the Queens Hall on October 9. And, sure, for many years London, where he will grace the Royal Festival Hall on October 4, was his home and base of operations.

But, as every one of the fifteen hundred souls gathered together amid the old-world plush of the venerable Theatre Royal would insist on telling you, Edwyn belongs to Glasgow, even if, tonight, it feels more like Glasgow belongs to him.

This is the tour’s third stop, and there are nine more shows to come. But here is where it should end, because here’s where it began.

He ignores the obvious

Just around the corner lies the site where once stood the Apollo, the fabled dive where, in 1978, the eighteen-year old Collins, by then resident in Glasgow’s suburbs for three years, first met Alan Horne, another young face in the crowd at a David Bowie gig.

A brisk walk in the other direction will quickly take you to 185 West Princes Street, and the tenement flat where the pair soon after launched Postcard Records, the categorically independent label spearheaded by Collins’s Orange Juice, whose sound and attitude laid down a blueprint many have since taken up as a kind of DIY Bible. (Certainly, members of several generations of Glasgow bands who would not have sounded quite the same without Orange Juice’s example are scattered among the crowd tonight.)

Along the way, you will pass the ruins of the Art School, the great building wiped out by fire, where Orange Juice played their first gig in 1979.

While it would make for perfect dramatic symmetry for Collins to bring his performing career to a close in Glasgow, it is entirely in keeping with the man that he ignores the obvious and the iconic and any heroic metaphors for his own life, and ploughs into the moment at hand.

He is continually transformed by his music

Even at its most meticulously constructed, Collin’s music has always been about the mess and the giddy rush of life, loose threads, stolen moments and ragged edges. The opening salvo of “Falling And Laughing” and “Dying Day” underline this, with Patrick Ralla’s lead guitar unearthing the precise pitch of ear-splitting, wire-thin treble that scythed and glimmered through the Orange Juice originals, while Carwyn Ellis’s superb bass picks up the heartbeat that held it all together.

As has been the case for 20 years now, since the double stroke that changed, and almost ended, everything for Collins, and the accompanying aphasia that sought to rob him of the dazzling wordplay of his songwriting, the first thing that strikes you when he starts to sing is how he is continually transformed by his music.

The voice that can sometimes falter in speech these days is suddenly back there at its thick, strong, rubbery baritone best in song. If you begin the night by thinking it is incredible that he’s playing at all, within seconds you’re knocked back into thinking: this just sounds incredible.

“So hard to let my old self go”

In other circumstances, this tour would showcase this year’s fine album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation. But only two tracks make the cut tonight, although one, “Knowledge”, a beautifully simple and direct song about where Edwyn once was, and where he finds himself now – “So hard to let my old self go” he repeats, over and over again – is the night’s first perilously poignant moment.

Instead, as a farewell, the setlist draws generously from across his career, offering a taste of everything that has gone into his music: all that Velvets and Motown and Chic meets Joe Meek, with Harry Nilsson arm wrestling Lee Hazelwood over a Sugarhill Gang 12” in the background. There’s a hefty helping of 1994’s Gorgeous George, the album that gave birth to the world-devouring Northern Soul monster “A Girl Like You” – that hit is inevitably one of the hardest grooves of the night; but a weightless, floating take on the title track is more gorgeous yet. A late acoustic reading of “Low Expectations”, with Collins breaking out a plaintive, one-handed harmonica solo, becomes the moment when the tidal wave of emotion building in the room starts to overflood us.

Touching in another way is “In Your Eyes”, from 2010’s Losing Sleep, for which Edwyn is joined in call and response duet by his son, William, whose band Bayview opened the bill tonight, looking delighted and embarrassed as his old man drags him out and insists on telling the crowd about “the beautiful girl” he’s just married, before the pair lay us entirely to waste with the song itself.

The unending list of hits that should have been

In the crowd, it seems as if there are lots of friends, people who have bumped into each other unexpectedly, for the first time in too long, all suddenly, strangely, feeling all the years that have passed, all the life that has happened. It happens again when Edwyn announces that he thinks he should try standing now, his silver-topped cane is brought on from the wings, and he grabs it and takes to his feet for the defiant, rousing, rushing call to arms that is “Don’t Shilly Shally”, yet another in the seemingly unending list of hits that should have been.

Time and again, though, Collins returns to Orange Juice, whose songs make up half the show, from the glinting rumble and roll of “Simply Thrilled” through the swamp roar of “What Presence” and the deathless squelch of “Rip It Up”, to the fragile likes of “In A Nutshell” and “Intuition Told Me (Part One)”. The latter is one of the night’s most unanticipated moments, but more unexpected yet is when, at the end of the encore, Edwyn, without fuss, announces, “A surprise.”

“The best song ever written”

Greeted with a palpable sense of shock and delight, this turns out to be the arrival on stage of James Kirk and Steven Daly, guitar and drums of the original Orange Juice, and the reunion Edwyn promised would never happen – the only one missing is bassist David McClymont, who has the borderline acceptable excuse of living in Australia these days. Save for a brief get together at a private event for the Nordoff Robbins music therapy charity in the early days of Edwyn’s post-stroke recovery in 2008, it’s the first time they have shared a stage since 1981.

As they launch into “Felicity” as though it was only last week, someone screams out, “The best song ever written,” and Edwyn agrees, even though it was Kirk who wrote it. It can’t be the best song ever written, though, because here they are, following it up with “Blue Boy”. Ye gods.

By now we know it’s about to end. Edwyn Collins will continue to record, but he won’t be doing this again, not here, and after tonight he maybe has no need to. “Blue Boy, whoa, whoa, Blue Boy, cheerio…” There are tears as the lights go up, though whether from joy or sorrow is hard to say. You can’t hide your love forever. No one here was trying, anyway. Crying. Laughing. Falling. Thrilled.

Edwyn Collins’s setlist at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, September 27, 2025

Falling and Laughing

Dying Day

Make Me Feel Again

The Campaign For Real Rock

Gorgeous George

Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

Knowledge

Wheels Of Love

What Presence

In Your Eyes

In A Nutshell

Intuition Told Me (Part One)

Simply Thrilled

Consolation Prize

I Can’t Help Myself

Rip It Up

Don’t Shilly Shally

A Girl Like You

Low Expectations

Home Again

Felicity

Blue Boy