John Paul Hammond

(m81-16-35)

King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow. Copyright marc marnie.

John Hammond, Renfrew Ferry, Glasgow. Rob Adams

There's something of the Punch 'n' Judy Show about John Hammond's gigs, with his guitar as Judy and his picking hand playing Punch. Having bypassed the New York college boy clique who turned the country blues into an academic kind of finger ballet, Hammond presents the music in all its ragged glory, reducing the average guitar string's life expectancy to mere bars.

Hammond is currently keeping the string packers busy - he popped two here in one spectacularly wilful response to love gone wrong - in support of his latest album, Wicked Grin, whose Tom Waits production and composition credits have gained Hammond his best press coverage in eons. The two are old friends and highly compatible, Waits's beat poetry being essentially blues with more O levels.

It was certainly no distance at all from Hammond's splendidly self-contained first-half reading of Howlin' Wolf's How Many More Years, complete with suitably bereft howl, to the whip-cracking strains of Waits's Get Behind the Mule. And while the concert was split to focus, second-half, on the Wicked Grin material, the juxtaposition of Li'l Son Jackson's pained, impassioned Homeless Blues with Waits's Big Black Mariah and the tough, steel bodied slide of Buzz Fledderjohn only underlined the suitability of Hammond's idiosyncratic, rough-assed blues styling and hurtin', heart-on-sleeve vocals as vehicles for Waits's low side of the road vignettes.

The evening's one doubt, which Hammond shared, was Fannin Street, specially written for him but suited more to a country, rather than country blues, singer and potentially the closest Waits has come to the mainstream since the Eagles covered Ol' 55. If it picks up similar royalties, surely Hammond won't mind doing the demo.