Sharleen Spiteri walks on to a wolf whistle. “Seriously?” asks the 47-year-old singer. “I thought I’d passed that moment.” As she turns her back to pick up her guitar, another wolf whistle rings out. “Fuck off!” she yells.
So begins an unexpectedly uproarious evening with the Glaswegian veterans. They are “celebrating their 25th anniversary” (although they formed in 1986) after shifting 37m albums, enduring various ups and downs and giving the potty-mouthed singer enough material for a career in stand-up comedy.
There’s the time they were recording with Chic’s Bernard Edwards when he got “off his tits” and ran off into the desert, and the time Spiteri found herself being snogged – “full tongues” – by Jane Birkin onstage. The audience gasp as Peter Kay strolls on – he’s been friends with the band since he starred in the Sleep video – and picks Spiteri up while she’s singing. “You have a large gay following,” the heavyweight comedian reminds her. “Is it me?” Boom boom.
There’s so much japery that 21 songs take up three hours. Texas may be a squarely mainstream staple who’ve never quite produced a classic, but the likes of Halo, Summer Son and Say What You Want are sparkling pop singles and even at their most back-of-a-taxi radio AOR, the velvet-voiced singer is a fantastic frontwoman.
By the time they add a brass section, she owns the stage so completely that the venue may struggle to get it back. At one point, she’s channelling her inner Dusty Springfield into the vulnerable 60s pop of All the Times I Cried, at another wandering offstage to lead a mass rendition of Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday for someone in the audience. “How fucking tall are you?” she asks the towering birthday boy. “I feel like Minnie the Minx.” A minx, perhaps, but only if on her own terms.
• At Alhambra, Dunfermline, 24 April. Box office: 01383 740384. Then touring.
