Tonight the CMEAS tour has hit town. Featuring Van Preston from the USA, Australia's Krishna Jones and Sweden's Erik Morell, it's a bit of an oddity in today's music business. Artists from around the world pile themselves into a bus fuelled by waste oil from chip shops and sing their way around the UK.
First up is Van Preston accompanied by Erik Morell on guitar. She's petite, she's got a big voice and she's mainstream country. Not the Americana that we usually hear these days but proper pickup truck friendly Nashville. Definitely more Barbara Mandrell than Alison Krause, she belts out her songs - and she writes much of her own material too - with confidence and no small amount of charm with "Bought Myself a Toy" going down particularly well with the audience. Given what the "toy" in question is, there's a strong possibility that she might get excommunicated from the Grand Ole Opry though. Personally speaking, the ballad "Forever Ago" did it for me.
Erik Morell then did his solo thing. You'd never guess he was Swedish by the way -he sounded and behaved like a native of Nashville and his songs likewise showed the polish you would expect of a musician from that part of the world. He proved pretty handy with his guitar as well.
The reason to be here is on next. Krishna Jones is an Australian artist that sounds like Lenny Kravitz would sound like if he got the blues. His aggressive style on the guitar was a joy to behold. Just the kind of thing that would make a man want to pick up a guitar and learn to play it. However, it would be take quite a long, long time to develop the kind of dexterity that was on show tonight. Dragging CMEAS main man Ben Ruth (of Lancaster band The Convulsions) on stage to add some fiery harmonica was icing on the alcohol soaked cake.
Local boy Matt Hickman then popped upon stage with a guitar - the music really didn't stop all night long - and played a few songs. He proved a very likeable performer.
Rounding things off was one of those end of the evening jam sessions that are a very welcome feature of these CMEAS tours. They're almost organic as the assembled musicians blast their way through pretty much any song that they all know. The quality music truly kept on coming.
With a song in my heart therefore, I hit the road back to Glasgow via Kilbirnie. Who said sat-navs don't have a sense of humour?