Friday 6th February 2026

Gullivers, Manchester, England

“But he that hath the steerage of my course

Direct my sail. On, lusty gentlemen.”

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet, ACT 1, SCENE 4, 119-120

Mere seconds into the night of music and the touchpaper is already lit. In what surely ranks as the most triumphant performance by an opening act I’ve yet seen, Dan MacDonald climbs onto the stage of the packed room above Gullivers bar and, without so much as a ‘hello’, begins strumming lustily on his acoustic guitar. He tears through a sea shanty in a fine, high-spirited voice, his hair flopping as he plays.

By the time the chorus comes around a second time the boisterous Friday-night crowd is already fully committed. “Hi ho, hi ho, we’re bound for Callao,” the crowd roars, swaying back and forth to the shanty. The American on the stage breaks into a grin, one that matches the one of the Halloween pumpkin on his orange shirt. He’s pleased that his kindling has immediately caught fire. “I should quit now!” he jokes at song’s end. “I don’t think it gets better than that song!”

It’s a stirring start, and one the musician is keen to continue. He picks up a fiddle, and while his second song, ‘Right Misty Day’, is slower and more delicate than its predecessor, the crowd stomps its feet in time and loudly cheers its end. “I made it, mom!” Dan shouts. “We all made it. We all did this together.”

It’s an unexpected triumph. I didn’t know what to expect from the opener coming into the night, but it wasn’t the bright cluster of winsome folk songs that the Michigan native is currently delivering. His stage name, Spitzer Space Telescope, might bring to mind a zany prog-rock band or hidden-away electronica project, but the music is anything but. He has eight songs in his half-hour set tonight, and while I’m not yet familiar enough with his music to place a few of his songs – including that opening ‘Bound for Callao’, which stays stuck in my head for days after – I resolve that I will be.

The songs are quality, the performances even more so. His third song, ‘Kayne in the Orchard’, about his memories of doing seasonal work on a cider farm in Cornwall, is delivered a cappella, as is a fifth song I cannot source, and both hold the audience transfixed throughout. His fourth and sixth songs, ‘Old Lazarus’ Harp’ and ‘Rovin’ is Me Pleasure’ are faster numbers, with foot stomps accompanying Dan’s fiddle and guitar respectively.

After another short fiddle tune, Dan launches lustily into his final ‘Midwest Tribute Song’. Deserved cheers again greet its end, and another cheer is raised as he walks back through the crowd. Spitzer Space Telescope has been everything you want an opener to be and more; he has whipped up the crowd and prepared the ground for the main act, while compelling you to remember the name once the night is out, for his is music you should explore as the first priority. It’s a fitting performance, because I only became aware of tonight’s main act, Sam Shackleton, after he opened for Oliver Anthony in September. If Sam was a revelation that night, a sort of Scottish Nick Shoulders leading me to be here at Gullivers tonight, then Dan is a similar revelation.

In the half-hour wait between the end of the opening set and Sam Shackleton’s arrival on stage, the music coming from the soundsystem returns. There’s been Bill Withers, Dire Straits, a plethora of Creedence songs. And Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s is a name that occurs to me frequently tonight. Not because I would be foolish enough to compare his songwriting genius to either of tonight’s musicians – most of Sam’s setlist tonight is made up of traditional songs, although his few self-penned ones are perfectly respectable – but because listening to Spitzer Space Telescope and Sam Shackleton tonight has that same folk power you feel when listening to early Dylan or Baez or the other champions of the folk revival. The hearty folk melodies. The lusty singing. For Sam the bold harmonica and for Dan the piercing fiddle, and for both the rhythmic strumming of guitar strings that sounds like a knock on the door that houses the troubadours of old, and bids them come forth. As the crowd stomps on the floor of the room above Gullivers bar tonight, and the guitar chords strum confidently from the stage, one could quite easily imagine this selfsame scene taking place in barrooms across our isles at any point in the last few hundred years. Only the occasional flash of a mobile phone reminds you that the year is 2026.

When Sam Shackleton does take the stage, bumping shoulders with me as he walks through the front of the crowd, it’s for what is only his second-ever headline show in England. (The first was twenty-four hours earlier, in London.) As he says nearly two hours later, towards the end of his impressive set, he’s starting to try doing his own headline shows after years of opening. On this evidence, he’ll be a success. The Manchester crowd loves him.

Sometimes it loves him a bit too much. It’s no Ball of Kerrymuir, but a few times when introducing his songs Sam is knocked out of his stride by drunken hecklers crossing the line from enthusiastic shouting to obnoxious yelling and Main Character Syndrome. He deals with it genially each time in his warm Scottish brogue – “I’ll forgive ya, maybe not a second time”; “Alright, that’s the last one”; “that’s lovely, my friend” – but it’s clear he knows the culprits have given themselves too long a leash. After one particularly banal bout of chanting from a woman near the front, a weary male cry comes up from towards the back of the room. “Ah, shuddup,” the voice says, and the room murmurs in agreement. “Well, he said it,” Sam smiles, diplomatically letting the hecklers know which side he’s on.

In truth, even in their excess the hecklers can’t disrupt the night too much, because a set of raucous folk songs sung in a thick Scottish accent is pretty much guaranteed to rattle heartily along the rails, even while the music is strong enough to ensure it doesn’t careen off them entirely. ‘Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie’, Sam’s opening song, sets the tone. Delivered a cappella by Sam with a pint of Guinness in hand, he tolls a simple drumbeat with the pedalboard at his feet. This percussion can be heard throughout the night, save for when it is outmatched by the foot-stomping of the crowd.

Sam follows the song with two of his staples, the murder ballad ‘Eggs and Marrowbone’ and ‘The Overgate’, a “failed love song”, on his acoustic guitar. But it’s his lesser-known picks of traditional songs that stand out in the first part of his set; the “sailing ballad” ‘Banks of Newfoundland’ and ‘Fair and Tender Ladies’, and the wonderful Rabbie Burns-penned ‘Green Grow the Rashes O’. The Scotsman will be devastated to learn it’s not the best Rabbie Burns I’ve ever heard, nor even the best I’ve heard at Gullivers – that honour remains with Toria Wooff’s stunning version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ here just a couple of months ago – though it’s a fine display of balladry regardless.

If the elfin Toria could stun the Gullivers crowd into silence – in what must be a first for the song, we all forgot to sing along to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – Sam’s invocation of Scotland’s national poet is, at the very least, saving him a wee bit of money. After his performance of ‘Ye Scottish by Name’, which reimagines Burns’ ‘Ye Jacobites by Name’ as a song about modern Scottish independence, a bald, bearded man who had left and returned to the front row passes a glass up to the raised stage.

“Oh, a pint of Guinness, I’ll accept that,” Sam says in surprise. “That’s one interruption I don’t mind at all.” The man in question can be found dancing and pumping his fists at the front all night, showing that enthusiastic engagement with the music can be done right without disruption to anyone else’s vibe. At the end of the night, Sam will lean down and chat with his beverage-bunging benefactor, handing him a requested setlist.

In a fine foreshadowing of where the night is heading, Sam roars lustily through the “Glasgow street song” ‘Johnny Laddie’, inciting a boozy singalong from a crowd which is only increasing in energy and raucous temper. As he sets his guitar against a stack of plastic crates and picks up his banjo, the crates collapse. His scheme to use them as an improvised guitar stand gang agley, he recovers to lead the crowd steadily through the banjo-backed beat of ‘Sweet Snowy North’ and ‘The Lone Prairie’, showcasing his winning synergy of native folk flavours with their American cousins.

The banjo becomes more propulsive on ‘Wild Bill Jones’, before rearing up for the slower, pensive, almost waltz-like ‘The Butcher Boy’, a “sad song about suicide”. Sam’s plaintive whistles accentuate its lonesome sound.

“I promise that’s as miserable as it gets,” Sam says after the song ends. “It’s only up from here after that one.” And he’s not wrong, for next up are the three best performances of the night. He introduces ‘Tramps and Hawkers’ as one of his favourite Scottish ballads, and it’s another lusty, propulsive song well-judged for this stage of the setlist. The crowd is only too happy to singalong to the chorus once they pick it up.

It’s followed by yet another lusty singalong, this time to ‘Gambling Davey’, with Sam recapturing the same propulsive beat he has just let go in ‘Tramps and Hawkers’. Sam says he forgot to sing it in London the night before and a man came up and said he was sad he hadn’t played it. There’s no such disappointment in Manchester as the Gullivers crowd claps and stomps, and perhaps the loudest cheers of the night greet its end.

The best song, however, is about to arrive. As we enter the endgame, Sam Shackleton straps one of those harmonica contraptions to his chest. “This is the latter stage of my set now,” he says. “So I’m gonna play you some belters.”

In a break from what’s come before, Sam now plays some of his own self-penned tunes, starting with what I consider his best – and the best song on the night, too. Trading banjo for the insistent strumming of his acoustic guitar, and now accompanied by a stirring harmonica sound, Sam summons forth the fatalistic and foreboding ‘Weary Rambler’.

It’s an exciting indication of where this young Scotsman may yet roam with his talent, followed by the similarly-excellent ‘The Blackest Crow’ and the crowd-pleasing singalong ‘Scottish Cowboy’. He admits he ought to start playing more of his own songs in his sets, and the crowd agrees. Someone shouts for his ‘Pink Collar Blues’ – “that’s actually coming”, he says, “so you’re good” – and while he doesn’t play the requested ‘Summer Sailor’, he does play the similar ‘Song to a King’.

Shortly before he plays ‘Pink Collar Blues’ to end his set, a cathartic song about punching your employer when you’re in a shit job, he’s inundated with more such requests. “That’s a good one too,” he says diplomatically. “I gotta start writing these down.” He pauses. “Actually, I have. They’re my own songs, aren’t they? Hmm.” As the crowd laughs, one hopes that he has gained encouragement from these requests, even if tonight’s 11pm curfew means he can’t fulfil them. Now that Sam is beginning to blossom as a headline act, the expanded setlists might mean his own songwriting has space to grow. One hopes he recognises it. He could rove far.

But for now, it’s the traditional songs which form the tried-and-true backbone of his set. He introduces ‘Old Rosin the Bow’ by name, drawing an audible gasp from a handsome blonde woman near the front. And after hiding comically behind the stage’s dark green curtain as the crowd shouts for an encore (“How fuckin’ stupid was tha’?” he says when he returns. “That’s what every encore is, really.”), it is the traditional songs that carry us home.

Sam doesn’t play one of my favourite folk songs among those he’s been known to cover, ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ (a song enjoying a new lease of life lately due to its use in the Oscar-nominated From Dusk Till Dawn remake Sinners), but instead he ends with the on-the-nose political song ‘All You Fascists’ and finally returns, of course, to Rabbie Burns.

There comes, at the death, the first and only boos of the night – and only because Sam has announced to the buzzing crowd that “this is the last song of the night”.

“That’s OK,” he laughs among the ironic boos. “I’ll take that.”

And with that he picks up his banjo for his final song, ‘MacPherson’s Rant’ by the ubiquitous Burns. “Play a tune and we’ll dance to the moon ‘neath the gallows tree,” he sings to end this special Friday evening at Gullivers bar. It’s a fitting coda to the night, a rousing, high-spirited singalong as the voices of Sam Shackleton and his rowdy crowd “set MacPherson free”.

Setlist:

(all songs are traditional folk songs of unknown authorship, unless noted)

  1. Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie (Robert Burns) (unreleased)
  2. Eggs and Marrowbone (unreleased)
  3. The Overgate (single)
  4. Green Grow the Rashes O (Burns) (unreleased)
  5. Banks of Newfoundland (unreleased)
  6. Fair and Tender Ladies (unreleased)
  7. Ye Scottish by Name (Burns/Traditional) (from Scottish Folk Ballads of Freedom)
  8. Johnny Laddie (from Scottish Folk)
  9. Sweet Snowy North (from Scottish Cowboy Ballads & Early American Folk Songs)
  10. The Lone Prairie (single)
  11. Wild Bill Jones (single)
  12. The Butcher Boy (from Scottish Cowboy)
  13. Tramps and Hawkers (Jimmie Henderson/Traditional) (from Scottish Folk)
  14. Gambling Davey (from Causeway Recordings)
  15. Weary Rambler (Sam Shackleton) (from Causeway)
  16. The Blackest Crow (from Scottish Cowboy)
  17. Scottish Cowboy (Shackleton) (from Causeway)
  18. Song to a King (Shackleton) (from Green and Yellow)
  19. Old Rosin the Bow (from Scottish Cowboy)
  20. Pink Collar Blues (Shackleton) (from Causeway)
  21. Encore: All You Fascists (Woody Guthrie) (unreleased)
  22. Encore: MacPherson’s Rant (Burns/Traditional) (from Scottish Folk)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.