For guest vocalist Lisa Hannigan, joining the Roaming Roots Revue is like ‘taking your inner child out for an ice cream’. For audience members, the gig is a top-drawer lucky bag of lovingly rendered rock and pop classics which started life as a hopeful pitch by Roddy Hart to create Celtic Connections’ own version of Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble Sessions. The project has grown from its 2012 debut in front of 400 prescient punters to this standing room-only established highlight of the festival programme.

Hart and trusty house band The Lonesome Fire, exquisitely supplemented by a brass section and harmony duo Zervas & Pepper on backing vocals, marked their tenth anniversary by revisiting the greatest hits of previous themed editions. This included Laurel Canyon songwriters to the 50^th anniversary of Abbey Road, with some lovely call-backs, such as inviting Rachel Sermanni (a guest on that very first show) to open proceedings, with tributes paid to the late Rab Noakes, who was due to play at this concert.

^{Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire and Rachel Sermanni (top) light up Celtic Connections. Pictures: Gaelle Beri}

Roddy Hart The 2023 line-up numbered some magnificent singers from Justin Currie to Jesca Hoop but there was tacit acknowledgement on stage and raucous appreciation in the crowd of the evening’s star turn: roistering ex-Temperance Movement frontman Phil Campbell. He absolutely aced ‘Hotel California’, ‘Born To Run’ and a particularly mighty ‘Oh! Darling’, rivalled only by Hoop’s impressive, witchy ‘Wuthering Heights’, and Peter and David Brewis of Field Music tag-teaming as David and Freddie on ‘Under Pressure’. The grand massed finale of a rollicking ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ wonderfully invoked the spirit of Levon Helm. 

Reviewed at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall as part of Celtic Connections.