The inaugural Glasgow Cabaret Festival featured 26 acts, a spectrum of performance from burlesque to theatre and most arts inbetween. Cabaret itself is a vague term; perhaps this is an advantage, meaning Ivor Cutler, Glasgow’s surrealist poet/bard granduncle, can be enjoyed meaningfully alongside other performers.

Glasgow is very posessive of Ivor Cutler. Born here, he chose to spend much of his adult life in London – perhaps a result of the anti-Semitic abuse he received at school as a child – courting the rising and falling attentions of publishers, radio stations and record labels. Cutler is rarely discussed as anything other than a unique one-off; while this is high praise – literally, there is nobody like him – it also means we’re deprived of understanding him as part of a wider world of entertainment, as a performer among other performers. For the Love of Cutler, the latest in a series of tribute nights run by Spangled Cabaret at Oran Mor, forecefully seperates the poetry from the man and the peculiarly memorable sound of his voice.

Apparently, competition to be part of the running bill was fierce. Roughly 20 different acts reimagined the songs he wrote – some, like The Bum Clocks, remained largely faithful to the material he wrote (performing the entirety of Cutler’s 1990 collection, Glasgow Dreamer) while others like Scunner, Glasgow Glam Bangers and The Martial Arts took fresher approaches with clanging snares and Korgs.

Overwhelmingly, though, performers embellished his work with a delicate and expert hand – Cutler preferred simple and catchy melodies with deceptively straightforward lyrics, and the economical language Cutler used was always intended to be the focus of his work. Dumb Instrument’s plaintive, harmonised rendering of Triangle of Hair is glorious, while the National Jazz Trio of Scotland’s version of Women of the World (listen out for Duglas T. Stewart of the BMX Bandits, lifelong Cutler lover) makes the impending disaster of patriarchy seem less apocalyptic and much more jolly than it should be.

For the Love of Cutler was an unusual and varied tribute night, reflecting the lovely awkwardness of the massive corpus he produced. It was exactly the sort of small-scale, impassioned thing Cutler himself might have liked, despite his love – apparent in his language and everything he wrote – of all things seemingly quiet and subtle.