Full of love: Butler, Blake and Grant, at the Union Chapel, reviewed

Years ago, I asked Robert Plant what he felt about the world’s love of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. He said he no longer really knew what the song was about, and it didn’t mean an awful lot to him. But, he added, that didn’t really matter because the people who loved the song had given it their own meaning. Songs don’t have to be as ubiquitous as ‘Stairway to Heaven’, however, to work their way into your soul. It’s perhaps even easier to develop a personal connection with a song that one doesn’t have to share with the entire world.

Last weekend I went to two shows that were very specifically about the past. At the Union Chapel – so cold that much of the crowd kept on their coats and woolly hats – I saw three guitarists chatting amiably as they cycled through their respective back catalogues. They weren’t shilling new albums, they weren’t promoting anything. They were simply playing for the absolute pleasure of it.

I have written about Norman Blake (of Teenage Fanclub) and Bernard Butler in these pages before, but James Grant was just a name to me. He was in a couple of never-quite-were bands in the 1980s – Friends Again and Love and Money. He’s released a few solo records since then that, to be honest, I wasn’t even aware existed (since this show I’ve been listening a lot to his 2013 album Sawdust in My Veins, which I commend to you wholeheartedly, especially if you ever liked Richard Hawley). His songs, which were glorious, were unexpected highlights, but because they were new to me they weren’t accompanied by the accumulated memories of some of the other songs.

Performing rock songs in the stripped-down ‘songwriters’ circle’ format can often rob them of their power, but that wasn’t the case here.