CMAT, Glasgow review: 'huge fun backed by serious musical chops'

CMAT, Barrowland, Glasgow ★★★★

Glasgow is CMAT’s kind of town - receptive to, even complicit in “my type of antics” - and Barrowland is her ideal venue. On the final night of a rescheduled three-night stand, the musician born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson was finally awarded her longed-for Barrowland Hall Of Fame plaque. Now all that remains for full Barrowland honours is that her ashes be scattered around this holy ground.

A pre-gig playlist of singalong female anthems greased the wheels for a different kind of singer, one who is not afraid to get down and grubby on the stage, takes gleeful joy in teasing her band with lengthy comic interludes and audience interactions in the middle of songs but who always hit her vocal mark.

Her lusty voice is where pop, country and soul come to play, her songs are droll anthems in their own right, such as the casually clever Janis Joplining (sample lyric “I don’t need to touch you, just speak to me like I’m your wife or a part of your soul”) which she began by popping up at the back of the hall, then dashing through the venue to the stage.

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Her “very sexy CMAT band” were in on this romp from the get-go, joining in with her dorky country dress code, riding fake-out endings, line-dancing and freeze posing during the beseeching I Don’t Really Care For You but also transforming The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station into an epic jam.

Along the way, Thompson paid tribute to her love of Sharleen Spiteri with a cover of Texas’s Inner Smile, willingly modelled some tartan underwear proffered by a fan (just in time for Take A Sexy Picture of Me) and successfully engaged the room in the Dunboyne County Meath Two Step sway during I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby! to deliver the quintessential CMAT show - huge fun backed up by serious musical chops.

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