Paolo Nutini, Edinburgh's Hogmanay, Edinburgh, review: He enjoys just the right level of creative freedom and financial support

“Let's get ready to say goodbye to this weird-ass year,” growls Paolo Nutini from the stage in the closing minutes of 2016, his performance in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle the highlight of the city’s famed annual New Year festival, alongside the firework display about to erupt overhead. His sentiment may have been appreciated by many, although to experience in person the joy brought on by his outstanding performance is to experience, at the last, the perfect antidote to the sadness and doom-mongering of the previous 12 months.

On the live stage, Nutini is an artist who demands not half-interested participation through the filter of a smartphone screen, but instead enjoyment of the visceral and redemptive charge of a genuine communal experience in the company of other human beings. Lord knows, it’s one which blows away the cobwebs of online life. Many reading maybe can’t find it in them to credit Nutini – a versatile and soulful Scots singer-songwriter with a strong commercial track record over the last decade – with the capacity to hit on anything approaching transcendental, but he’s one of those artists who can’t be understood until they’ve been experienced live.

Of course, he’s from Paisley, through in the west of Scotland, so there was much enthusiastic local solidarity here. The 29-year-old is also a rarity in today’s music industry, in that he enjoys just the right level of creative freedom and financial support (his mentor Ahmet Ertegun, the late boss of his label Atlantic Records, famously hand-picked Nutini to support Led Zeppelin at London’s O2 in 2007) to sound like himself, only on a huge budget. His band is extensive, featuring a three-piece horn section and a pair of backing singers, and his live sound is a textured analogue tidal wave of the kind rarely found these days outside artists twice Nutini’s age.

His performance blends steely-eyed focus, devilish Italian-Scots handsomeness and a raw, gravelly soul singer’s tone which bears echoes of Rod Stewart in his Faces prime. The songs, in practice forming a greatest hits set, are extended and matured far beyond their original form. The functional blues-funk of “Scream (Funk My Life Up)” is welded to a thunderous and dramatic rhythm section reminiscent of the Stone Roses; “Coming Up Easy” hits a peak of gospel power-come-full blooded crowd singalong with its glorious “it was in love I was created / and in love is how I hope I die” coda; and early hits “Jenny Don’t Be Hasty” and “New Shoes” were fused into a masterful narrative medley on the power of style and self-confidence over heartbreak.

The last song of the year, for those listening, is the hideously appropriate “Iron Sky”, which marries Nutini’s own musings on intense and stormy times with Charlie Chaplin’s iconic speech from the conclusion of The Great Dictator, and he returned to open 2017 with the hopeful, joyous “Pencil Full of Lead”, its cheery ragtime veneer replaced with a rhythm Neu! could have written. This year’s Edinburgh Hogmanay appears to have been programmed with such a mood, with main stage support the Lightning Seeds, young Scots contenders Be Charlotte and Fatherson, and the Charlatans – who closed the second stage amid the street party at the entrance to Waverley Station with the dependably gorgeous “Sproston Green” – all playing music for the good times, no matter how bittersweet.