After six "dark" months the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen's premier alternative venue for comedy, dance, drama and of course music, has re-opened its doors to the public. As the final act of a weekend of events to mark the occasion, King Creosote made the journey up from Fife to play an entertaining and extensive set.

In 1992 the Lemon Tree opened with a first gig from The Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra. As one of King Creosote's earlier guises they were able to reprise their role here and opened the night with a brief set of toe-tappingly good Scottish-tinged bluegrass. Clearly there were some crowd favourites amongst the songs and the band showed a great deal of panache. After about twenty-five minutes they stopped, complaining that they were a bit too old now to be playing fast-paced music for anything more than a half hour or so. Still, it was good fun whilst it lasted.

This cleared the way for The Pictish Trail to take to the stage. Introduced as "one of King Creosote's vanity projects", the Pictish Trail is Johnny Lynch who also plays guitar in King Creosote and is a fellow artist on Fence. After an opening solo song he was joined by other Fence members, including King Creosote, to accompany him through an excellent set of understated, warm and wistful songs. If Ben Gibbard in his Postal Service guise came in to work with the Reindeer Section I think you might get a similar result to the Pictish Trail. Certainly eccentric, it was endearing stuff and I ended up buying his solo CD immediately after the conclusion of the set.

To finish off what had already been an excellent night came King Creosote. Kenny Anderson was well warmed up by now and had the audience fully behind him as he launched into a cracking set of tracks which all sounded very fresh and full of energy. There were a couple of lovely ladies dancing next to me and it seemed like the restrained Aberdeen audience was finally letting its hair down a bit. The band showed equal desire to entertain, with The Pictish Trail producing some cheeky harmonies and chiming guitar work and another Fencer contributing lovely slide guitar.

He previewed a new track recorded for the tour only CD and finished off with a storming cover of his brother's (Lone Pigeon) Happy Song from The Aliens' debut album. It left the whole place with a real buzz and the promise of more great gigs to come at the Lemon Tree in the coming months.