Erja Lyytinen/The Gator - Edinburgh Blues Club Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh Saturday 6th April 2024

Erja released the outstanding live CD ‘Diamonds on the Road’ last year and the setlist for this tour largely replicates that. She opened with the fuzzy-slide riff excellence of the title track and that set the tone for the evening and got the discerning and knowledgeable blues-savvy audience tapping and clapping along. It’s a different band from the one captured on the live recording. Sami Osala (drums) and Heikki Saarenkunnas (bass) have combined with Erja to form a power-trio for this tour and, despite the absence of keyboards this time, they fill out the sound nicely and provide a great platform to showcase the main lady’s vocal and guitar prowess.

An early highlight is the lascivious-sounding ‘Bad Seed’ from the album ‘Waiting for the Daylight’. The readers of Guitar World voted Erja’s original solo on this song into their Top-10 of 2022 (Steve Vai won) and it was equally impressive in this live setting. That’s not the only competition that Erja has done well in – she also finished 7th in the 2012 edition of “Tansii Tahtien Kanssa”, which is Finland’s version of Strictly Come Dancing (Olli Herman of Reckless Love was 6th in 2019) and she clearly knows how to add glamour and style to her stage show to enhance a virtuoso performance.

The Edinburgh Blues Club first brought Erja to this room in 2015, their second year of operation. I believe ‘Black Ocean’ is the only song from that show that remains in the set-list and it definitely still deserves its place, unfolding melodically over around 7 minutes with Erja picking out a beautifully nuanced non-slide solo on her white and red guitar.

Incidentally, I understand that the correct pronunciation of the lady’s name is “Air-ya Lute-in-enn” but don’t feel bad if you’ve been saying it wrong, as Erja pronounced the name of her host city as “Edin-burgg” throughout the evening, so we’re even .

‘You Talk Dirty’ is another sexy-sounding song and it is a riff-tastic winner featuring heavy guitar and whammy bar action and even some very brief Tarja-style high vocals as it barrels along at high-octane pace. The main set ends with ‘Wedding Day’ but before the music ends, we are treated to an encore performance that includes Jimi’s ‘Crosstown Traffic’, complete with yodelling and kazoo, and it all rounds off nicely with ‘The End of the Music’.

The Edinburgh Blues Club always curates an outstanding programme of events. Members pay £12 per month but individual gig tickets are available to all and I am sure this show will go down as one of the highlights of this year’s calendar. Those who have not been fortunate enough to catch Erja’s live shows may want to seriously consider obtaining a copy of ‘Diamonds on the Road’ to hear what they have been missing. You won’t make the same mistake again.

*Traditional Scrabble enthusiasts will perhaps point out that ‘proper nouns’, including names, are not normally allowed in the game, so “pedantic” would actually be a better scoring word.

Alloa’s finest Delta-Bluesman and guitar tutor is Iain Donald, better known as ‘The Gator’ - the name that he uses for stage performances and for the excellent ‘Gaulty and The Gator’ blues podcast that he presents with his wife, Fiona.

For this prestigious opening slot, Iain was up there on his own, although he had plenty of strong support in the crowd. He admitted that this show was a big deal for him and that he had promised the promoters that he “wouldn’t be shite”! He also confessed to being nervous but covered the nerves up with some amusing and self-deprecating Clackmannanshire humour and there was no real need for concern as he is a very proficient guitar player indeed and that, alongside his smoky bourbon voice, makes him a very authentic blues troubadour.

He started off his set, unplugged and acoustic, with a highly personal selection of songs covering none-more-bluesy issues such as difficult parental relationships and death in the family. I was already feeling a bit down-hearted having watched my Bonnyrigg Rose football team cough up a 93rd minute equalizer in a vital game a few hours earlier, so this melancholic onslaught just about had me greeting into my third cider of the evening, but then, it is a blues club after all.

After the four “sad” songs, Iain plugged in a steel guitar and pulled out a slide to really show what he can do with an electric instrument. He is an exceptional player with great tone and feel. He favours economy of touch over fret-board flashiness and it was clear that his emotionally-charged performances of songs like ‘Shave Yo legs’ and ‘Dunoon Boat Song’ really struck a chord with some folks.

This dude really knows his blues and he kept his promise. He was not shite.