king of the blues blows hot and cold

Sunday Herald, The, Jul 15, 2001 by Barry Didcock

music bb king princes street gardens, edinburgh by Barry didcock

IT'S certainly a night for monuments. One, perhaps the more venerable, sits imposingly in front of us, the falling sun turning its rocky old face amber. But Edinburgh Castle doesn't disappoint either, glowering down from its volcanic perch as the King Of The Blues opens up his famous wide vibrato and lets his fingers pluck gusts of sound from his long-suffering guitar, Lucille. "I'm 75," he proclaims after laconic opener Let The Good Times Roll. "My band tells me I've earned the right to sit down if I want to."

It's just the first of many such gags. But if age has caused BB King to sit down it still hasn't stopped him setting down: his roadshow has been travelling the world for decades now and he and his band have entertained audiences in 89 countries.

He tells us so in his rich Mississippi drawl, between haranging us for our lack of participation (other audiences must be less frugal with their whoops and "Oh yeahs" than we douce Edinburghers) and our strange scottish method of dancing.

But while the cajoling and the showbiz chutzpah are amiable enough parts of the BB King show, they leave you with a sense that the real magic is being rationed out. The slick eight-piece backing band fill a certain space, but it's only the long dark moans from those six steel guitar strings that can really make you shiver and, sadly, that beautiful sound is an infrequent, rude guest at an othewise politely- behaved table.

The blues are a place where blood - either spilt, coughed up or shed by your baby - is real and where madness and badness are afflictions rather than narrative devices. However, the "baby done left me" lyrics airbrush the pain out of the equation.

Still, on a night like this, nobody but the purists would mind - this is the mighty BB King after all, the last of the great bluesman standing. Even when he's sitting.