Gary Stewart returned to The Crescent with his acclaimed Graceland show.
By Miles Salter
Built around Paul Simon’s 1986 album, the show takes the record as a basis for a rumbustious evening.
The Graceland album was one of the most distinctive albums of the 1980s, with Simon fusing African rhythms and western lyrics and guitars into an exciting mix. When Simon sang in Hyde Park in 2019, he said ‘these songs were built to be dance tunes’, and the crowd at The Crescent are ready to dance.
When Stewart’s band kicks off with Boy In The Bubble, the 180-strong audience is already swaying. This music can’t fail to move you. If it does, you’re probably dead.
The album’s title track comes into view, with its devastating line about how it feels when a relationship hits the skids. ‘Losing love is like a window in your heart, everybody sees you blown apart…’ The album is full of wonderful phrases. ‘Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room…’ ‘Angels in the architecture…’ ‘Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake…’ ‘The bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.’ Dramatic and pithy, the words are gorgeous.
Stewart is a busy chap these days – he plays bass in Weetwood Mac, a Fleetwood Mac tribute band. He drums for Hope and Social and does his own acoustic gigs. He’s always up to something. Nine years into this project (the first Graceland outing was at Kate Rusby’s Underneath The Stars festival in 2016) and he looks and sounds at home, occasionally commanding the band with hand gestures to denote song endings or changes.
Next to him on stage is the fantastic Kirsty Bowers, who barely stops smiling or dancing through the whole set. Bowers brings more to these gigs than just musicality. Apart from trumpet, flugel horn, percussion and backing vocals, she’s got an infectious energy that helps to light up the stage, sending out a powerful invitation to the audience: ‘be here now, folks, be happy.’
Less demonstrative are the male members, but they are wonderful players. Danny Laycock plays bass, James Warrender is on drums. Graham Butcher plays percussion (and hugely adds to the momentum of the music), and Lukas Creswell-Rost plays electric guitar. Sam Lawrence is another multi-instrumentalist, playing electric guitar, accordion, and whistle. Together they are formidable.
Playing a little with the order of the album, Stewart and company save the big hit, You Can Call Me Al, for the final song, before returning for an encore which includes a great reading of Duncan, one of Stewart’s favourite Paul Simon songs, and a beefed up Mrs Robinson.
Tribute acts are strange things. Their ascendancy over the last twenty years is a mixed blessing to live music. They’ve helped to keep music venues going even if they’re stock in trade is not originality.
Some may see this is as depressing. Original bands struggle to gain an audience where an AC/DC tribute show sells out. But this show rises above the crowd because Stewart and the band don’t slavishly follow the songs. There are little embellishments here and there, added flourishes.
And it’s joyful. In a world where oppressive news drowns us in reminders of human failure, here’s something that is boundlessly happy.
The Graceland show rolls on. Next year you can catch it at York Barbican in time for the album’s 40th anniversary. Go see it. It will lift you.
Gary Stewart’s Graceland was performed at The Crescent, York on Saturday 25 October 2025. It will be at York Barbican on Friday 1 May 2026 to coincide with the album’s 40th anniversary.
