TRNSMT(Saturday), Glasgow Green *** The second day of this annual gathering was largely dominated by earnest musicians with guitars. A few glistening pop shards were scattered throughout, but the bill was clearly geared towards the vast majority who’d turned up for Main Stage headliner Gerry Cinnamon. Fair enough, the organisers know their audience.
An afternoon highlight on the King Tut’s Stage was Katie Gregson-Macleod, a promising young singer-songwriter from Inverness who closed her set of introspective confessionals with an amusingly incongruous cover of Wheatus’ pop-punk smash Teenage Dirtbag. Advertisement Advertisement Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Over on the Main Stage, another young Scottish singer-songwriter, Dylan John Thomas, rattled through his repertoire of tuneful busker pop with a dour onstage demeanour entirely at odds with the music’s jauntiness.
’80s pop survivor Rick Astley provided a welcome change of gear with an unabashedly crowd-pleasing performance packed with singalong hits and covers – basically the same set he played at Glastonbury last year. He’s a likeable pro. Manchester’s Courteneers and Edinburgh’s Vistas couldn’t follow that, they plunged us into Now That’s What I Call Journeyman In.