Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Glasgow review: 'a righteous she-rocker'
Joan Jett’s music has always been a raucous tribute to the best the United States has produced, writes Fiona Shepherd
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, O2 Academy, Glasgow ★★★★
The rock’n’roll myth is that adherents live fast and die young. Those who make it through and keep it real, however, appear pleasingly pickled in time. Can it really be 45 years since Joan Jett launched her solo career with global smash hit I Love Rock’n’Roll? On her first UK headline tour in 16 years, the woman born Joan Marie Larkin still packed a mean rasp, wore her leather tight, her guitar low and remained utterly, naturally and very coolly committed to her chosen genre.
Her music has always been a raucous tribute to the best the US has produced.
In person, she made a simple direct defence of universal social values, asking for some grace for “the country we imagine ourselves to be” as a preamble to tuneful nosebleed punk track Change the World.
Even her intro cuts, Wanda Jackson’s Let’s Have a Party and Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl, drew a cross-generational link between righteous she-rockers, with Jett herself as the cultural connection, pitching in her own classic, Cherry Bomb, by her first band The Runaways early in the set.
Moments later, she had the crowd singing along by stealth to Gary Glitter’s Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah). Jett hails from a generation which doesn’t apologise or conflate the value of an artist’s catalogue with their behaviour. Such was her fidelity to the cause that newer material such as the cartoony (Make the Music Go) Boom was barely distinguishable from the older tunes.
Variety was baked in to the sound, with the easy rootsy rocking of The Replacements’ Androgynous, her gritty take on Sly Stone's Everyday People and a rocked up rendition of Tommy James and the Shondells’ Crimson and Clover all part of her eclectic jukebox and her own gleefully snotty, turbo-charged Bad Reputation staking her place consummately in the tradition.
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