Brooke Combe @ Barrowlands, Glasgow, 19 Apr

“You know what I love about this show?” Brooke Combe says between songs as the band reset. “All the other dates on the tour, the crowd have been mute between songs, but yous are all blethering away. It’s like blether blether blether… ah, it’s good to be home.”

This Saturday night show at the Barrowlands is the biggest of singer-songwriter Brooke Combe’s career and clearly represents an important milestone for the Dalkeith singer. It's here that Combe was presented with the Best Female Breakthrough award at the 2021 Scottish Music Awards, and in the years since she's broken through even further, releasing her punchy Northern Soul-inflected debut album Dancing At The Edge of the World at the top of this year.

Coming back to the venue as a headliner is straightforwardly exciting for Combe and she can’t contain it, running on stage draped in a Scotland flag, she shouts “Glasgow I’m BUZZIN” before launching into the irresistibly danceable This Town. Her next priority is a vibe check: “Right, does everyone have a drink?” she asks.

For a solo artist, the Brooke Combe show feels like a band’s performance. She moves through her bandmates over the course of the evening – shouting them out, including them in her stories and inviting them to talk to the crowd between tracks. Her thundering vocals are captured so well on the album, it's a thrill to discover they sound even better live. The stripped-back emotion of songs like Guilt ('You’re no good for me, and it’s killing me / A pain only you can heal') and the pleading, piano-driven Shaken By The Wind come to life in a whole new way on stage.

Image: Brooke Combe @ Barrowlands, Glasgow, 19 Apr by Serena Milesi

Dancing At The Edge of the World was produced by James Skelly who gets a shoutout during a conversational interlude. “In the studio he asked me, what is your heartbreak? And I don’t have a heartbreak because I walked in with this lovely man here,” she says, gesturing at guitarist Danny Murphy, met with a ripple of oohs from the crowd at this revelation. The confessions get even more vulnerable, as Combe continues in her charming gossipy manner: “I’m going to be honest with you guys because we’re friends… my step mother, OK? She’s trying to silence me. We don’t get along. And I was showing him [Skelly] these long paragraph texts she sends me and at the end I’d written 'LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!'”

This sets things up nicely for a loud and cathartic singalong of L.M.T.F.A. – one of the set’s highlights. Towards the end of the evening Combe gathers her bandmates in a line. “I never do this!” she says, before asking the Barrowlands audience to scooch in and wave as the group line up for a selfie on the venue’s iconic stage. A well-earned moment of reflection for this special homecoming show, a gloriously sunny hour of soul which more than rose to the occasion.