Alice Faye – Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow – Celtic Connections 2026 (review)

Alice Faye takes to the stage of a refurbished Victorian music hall to a tune from a musical about a kind-hearted cabaret dancer, sits at a grand piano and sings about a Rita Hayworth¹ movie. She is clearly going for something – an aesthetic of dilapidated grandeur and shaky moral virtue, and an underlying sadness that hiding behind beauty is still hiding after all. 

She’s thought about this. She’s thought about everything, it seems – the band in greasepaint looking like weimar cabaret, or Fred Schneider, or Dean Stockton in Blue Velvet² – her sisters on stage adding a weight to songs named after them, the lyric sheets on the seats of the audience.  This is an artist who knows what she wants to achieve.

She is also an artist very much in a world of her own. While there are clear touchstones here – Paul Willams³, Maria Muldar, pre-swordfishtrombones Tom Waits⁴, and yes, Carly Simon – she’s not aping any of them, but she seems to have an ability to be able execute a vision without being influenced by expectation.

And also, of course, very skilled. She moves between piano, guitar and ukulele⁵; between solo speculation and full band celebration, between country and jazz and Laurel Canyon. There’s a vocal range from an alto vibrato to a fluttery falsetto that can give guttural smut and angelic naivete, and a lovely knowledge of how and when to deploy a well placed swearyword. A good dose of self-awareness too, laughing at a younger self that anticipates heartbreak over romance, of the joy of a good old wallow.

She closes with ‘Silly Little Fool’ – a song with a glorious growl of self knowledge about it – and rattles through ‘Reject’ as an encore with a nod and a wink to the conventions of the will-they-won’t-they of the whole thing.

Alice Faye

Main Photo Credit: Jean Yuzheng Zhang

1. Listen, I’ve always hated when journalists get all overly referential because it implies this like, shared language that many people don’t have and then it’s like do you feel bad about that or whatever so I try to avoid it but in this case it’s so explicit that I couldn’t not. Also I’ve been re-reading a bunch of David Foster Wallace* that I loved in my 20s recently which might explain something vis-a-vis the general pretentiousness of this and also like my need to qualify everything with a like hundred word footnote.

2. Alice herself has the energy of Shelly Duvall in Popeye or Mia Goth in Pearl+ but I don’t actually think that’s intentional, just kind of how she is? It does add a certain friction to her nervous humility though.

*I am aware DFW is now shorthand for ‘sad gen-x boy who thinks his mental illness is interesting’ but that is also kind of my whole bit so, aye. Also he was good, he really was. Don’t let dickheads stop you from enjoying good things, I guess

+ah damn, footnoting footnotes and all that but isn’t it interesting that that’s just a kind of person? Like we all think we’re these unique butterfly prints or whatever but there’s actually maybe fifty types of guy?


3. I feel like I reference Paul Williams a lot and am never sure if people know who I’m on about but he is/was a great songwriter of that ‘kick-the-wheels’ school that doesn’t really exist anymore but also I just associate with the Muppets now, not that that’s like a pejorative or anything.

4. Not to wish time away or take away from what they’re doing now but I got excited about what post-swordfishtrombones Alice might be. Like you know those Joni albums where she got bored being a pop star and started listening to Mingus?

5. The uke gets a bad name –mainly due to a slew of terrible ironic covers in the mid 00s – but can be a very beautiful thing when used sparingly. I blame Glee.