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“My name is Gordon Lightfoot,” chuckled the man himself, 35 years after his last London show, “and rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” So they have, but only just: he has been pronounced dead by Twitter and recovered from both a stroke and an aortic aneurysm.
Unlike fellow Canadians Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Lightfoot has never quite received the acclaim his 54-year recording career unquestionably deserves, despite his Early Morning Rain being covered by Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Paul Weller. Whether, at the ripe old age of 77, he should still be taking that splendid catalogue on the road is more open to debate and last night wasn’t an entirely glorious return to the land where he hosted the BBC’s Country & Western Show in 1962.
Lightfoot’s once velvet voice is now reduced to a muted croak, which may have rendered the extraordinary If You Could Read My Mind more cutting still, but it wreaked havoc on story songs such as The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the jealousy-infused Sundown.
For all the supple subtlety of his gifted four-piece band, the frustratingly hushed sound struggled to reach beyond the first few rows and, least forgivably of all, Lightfoot undermined his own canon by radically shortening a clutch of staples including Rainy Day People, “so we can play more songs”. Sometimes, more is less.