Ah, the perils of playing hard and fast when you’re old enough to have a bus pass.
That the founding duo of the Scottish indie band much beloved of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, are now heading towards their Thursday Murder Club years seems in one way very clear throughout the band’s 90-minute set in Dunfermline on Saturday night, with Kelly also vocalising a need for electrolytes and his fellow original Vaseline Frances McKee suggesting at one point that she would quite like a tea break.
In other ways, though, the band remains eternally youthful; an expression of alternative music that feels both very 1980s and very Scottish in its insistence on close male-and-female harmonies played out against the snarl of an electric guitar.
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That said, The Vaselines in 2025 are a muscular six-piece unit who inject a real drive and potency to the basic 1-2-3-4 dynamics of the songs. The term “shambolic” – used in conjunction with the band in its early days – doesn’t really apply anymore. Indeed, on a track like Sex with an X the sound has a lascivious urgency that gives it an edge over the recorded version.
Admittedly, now and again – as they careen through tunes at over-the-limit speed – you do wonder if the band is totally in control of the noise that’s being made. But that just adds to the excitement.
And on the slower numbers – not that there are many of those – there’s a real poise on display. Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam, one of the three Vaselines tracks covered by Nirvana, plays out here with a quicksilver sense of melancholy.
Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana covered three Vaselines tracks (Image: free) The Vaselines’ story has turned out to have the longest of long tails. Formed in 1987, Kelly and McKee had split up – both professionally and personally – by 1989. McKee then had a stint as a primary school teacher before becoming a yoga instructor (though there were other bands too), whilst Kelly went on to lead the bands Captain America and later Eugenius.
But after a short-lived reformation to support Nirvana in 1990. the two of them came back together properly in 2008, releasing two new albums in 2008 and 2014. They remain an entertaining live draw, as tonight proves, with Kelly and McKee bantering – sometimes spikily – between a succession of short, sharp songs, all ending with a thrilling, ballistic take on Son of a Gun.
“Nearly time for us to go back to our coffins, Frances,” Kelly says as the evening draws to a close. “They’re going to put the lid on us and we’re going to have a good wee sleep.”
If anything, the evidence of this evening would suggest that The Vaselines have never been more awake.