Stacie Collins: Shinin’ Live!

Nashville-bred country-blues rocker rips it up in Kendal.

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Raw and feisty Deep South roadhouse raunch delivered with nerve-jangling aplomb found an unlikely home when firebrand Collins returned to Lake District venue the Bootleggers last October.

A set chiefly drawing on her three original albums foregrounds an impressively defiant and commanding presence that’s anchored by the Al Collins-fronted band (her husband and Jason And The Scorchers member). Booze and gasoline-fired riffs are stoked by Stacie’s own blow-a-hole-in-the-roof harmonica, but guitarist Jason Graumlich’s decorative and suggestive asides balance the rough and rowdy ways with a spiked pop sensibility (on Top Of That Mountain).

Add a triumphant, extended Jumpin’ Jack Flash and, on the accompanying DVD, a tailored-to-fit rampage through Gram Parsons’s Ooh Las Vegas and the proof of a lady excelling in a man’s world is abundant.

Gavin Martin
Gavin Martin

Late NME, Daily Mirror and Classic Rock writer Gavin Martin started writing about music in 1977 when he published his hand-written fanzine Alternative Ulster in Belfast. He moved to London in 1980 to become the NME’s Media Editor and features writer, where he interviewed the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer, Pete Townshend, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Ian Dury, Killing Joke, Neil Young, REM, Sting, Marvin Gaye, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, James Brown, Willie Nelson, Willie Dixon, Madonna and a host of others. He was also published in The Times, Guardian, Independent, Loaded, GQ and Uncut, he had pieces on Michael Jackson, Van Morrison and Frank Sinatra featured in The Faber Book Of Pop and Rock ’N’ Roll Is Here To Stay, and was the Daily Mirror’s regular music critic from 2001. He died in 2022.