After a notorious gig last year at which he stripped naked; got booed off stage and made the promoter cry, Phil Kay appears now to be in a calmer, more reflective mood, with a storytelling show promoting his autobiography and this slow-paced hour of music.
Indeed, there's something almost wierdly (and certainly unexpectedly) carthartic in sitting at the top of the Voodoo Rooms after a long day of running around Edinburgh, listening to Kay pour forth the contents of his mind in gravelly, bluesy baritone, alongside his adept guitar playing and the piano tinklings of his musical partner, Cameron St Clair.
A mishap with the set and recent goings-on in Edinburgh provide the material for a largely improvised first fifteen minutes, before Kay moves on to his prepared set of ostensibly entirely unconnected songs – most of which raise a roar from his hardcore fans and a titter from everyone else, although one or two do fall on stony ground. Whilst the show is billed as the creation of a concept album, it's never made clear what the concept is.
He alternately probes the darkest and most whimisical recesses of his mind, moving from a song about burying a parent to another about the new life the prawns of the Costa Concordia buffet Kay likes to think got when that ship capsized last year.
The audience are not in gales of laughter throughout, though whether this is a function of this being a new and quite different phase of his career, only time will tell.