Gun – The Calton Songs (2022) Review

Re-recording your own classics is a dangerous game.

Stay too faithful to the originals and there’s little reason for anybody to choose the new versions. Tear them apart completely and you risk stripping away the very things that made people love them in the first place.

For Gun, there was another complication.

Most of these songs were made famous with Mark Rankin behind the microphone, with current frontman Dante Gizzi playing bass guitar. When he declined an invitation to the band’s 2009 reunion, Gizzi stepped up and helped the Scottish rockers carve out an entirely different musical identity.

Rather than pretending those differences don’t exist, The Calton Songs embraces them.

Fourteen songs are stripped back, rearranged and rebuilt around the modern incarnation of Gun, with acoustic guitars, gospel vocals and looser instrumentation replacing much of the wall of noise found on the originals.

Some survive better than others — and a handful become even stronger than the originals.

Watching The World Go By

The project was born at a strange point in Gun’s second life.

Favourite Pleasures had finally restored the band to the UK Top 20 in 2017, and the band spent the following couple of years touring heavily and celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Taking On The World.

Then the pandemic brought everything to a screeching halt.

Giuliano Gizzi later recalled that the band had been preparing to enter the studio to begin work on the follow-up to Favourite Pleasures just as lockdown was announced, and the mental health struggles of being trapped at home while seeing their momentum slowly dissipate began to take a heavy toll.

Revisiting old material offered a welcome escape.

The first experiment was Better Days, stripped back and rebuilt simply to see what happened. The result was fresh enough to convince the brothers that the idea had legs, and one song gradually became an entire album.

Frontman Dante Gizzi began putting the recordings together in his spare bedroom, before moving the project into Glasgow’s Morsecode Studios once restrictions eased in early 2022.

There’s a pleasing symmetry to this humble starting point, because Gun had been here before.

Quite literally.

Back To The Calton

The album takes its name from Calton, the Glasgow neighbourhood where Jools and Dante Gizzi grew up.

Their childhood home was a stone’s throw from the famous Barrowland Ballroom, and it was inside those walls that they sat alongside Mark Rankin and began shaping the songs that would eventually take Gun around the world.

This gives The Calton Songs far more significance than the average unplugged collection.

Because when the crunching riffs and thunderous drums are stripped from each of the fourteen arrangements, it doesn’t necessarily feel like Gun shrinking their sound.

Instead, it feels like they’re bringing it back to where it all began.

Old Songs, New Sound

The greatest compliment you can give The Calton Songs is that Gun haven’t confused “acoustic” with “the same arrangement played quietly”.

Some of these songs have been pulled apart completely.

Don’t Say It’s Over is perhaps the boldest example. The gigantic guitar riff that powered the Swagger original is deleted, replaced by a haunting arrangement that provides the track with an entirely different character.

On paper, dismantling one of the best songs of their career sounds borderline irresponsible.

In practice, it’s magnificent.

The original remains untouchable as a piece of muscular mid-’90s rock, but this version uncovers something else in the song. Without that enormous riff dominating proceedings, the vocal melody carries far more emotional weight and Dante is able to take it somewhere Rankin’s original never attempted.

Inside Out also undergoes a successful transformation, its leaner arrangement giving the song more room to breathe. Meanwhile, hidden gem Money (Everybody Loves Her) settles comfortably into a looser groove.

Then there’s Coming Home.

Originally recorded during the Taking On The World era but left off the album, its melody sounds completely at ease within the lighter acoustic arrangement, and Dante gives it enough warmth to make if feel less like something recovered from the vault and more like a song that has finally found its proper home.

Elsewhere, the annoyingly catchy Crazy You strips away much of the synthetic sheen associated with Gun’s controversial late-’90s period and emerges with considerably more personality.

Finally, both Shame On You and Taking On The World prove just how sturdy the band’s early compositions were. One could argue that stripping the grand production from a song titled Taking On The World is a very risky move, but it unearths a vulnerability that the rock-driven original sorely lacked.

"I'm stuck in quicksand, sinking fast."

BACKSTREET BROTHERS

Word Up, Again

Of course Word Up is here.

There was probably more chance of Jools Gizzi turning up with a banjo than Gun releasing a retrospective collection without their biggest hit.

Thankfully, they resist the urge to simply recreate the enormous Swagger version with acoustic guitars. Instead, the rhythm is loosened considerably, and backing vocals from Beverley Skeete and The Sisterhood push it towards gospel and soul.

It doesn’t eclipse their definitive 1994 take, but it’s strong enough to earn its place here and rewards multiple listens.

Front And Centre

The star of the show is Dante Gizzi.

After moving from bass to lead vocals in 2012, albums such as Break The Silence and Favourite Pleasures proved that he could front the newly reformed Gun, but the band’s older catalogue still belonged, at least on record, to the voice of Mark Rankin.

It’s Gizzi’s sheer determination to measure himself against those classic tracks that gives The Calton Songs much of its purpose. He injects these decades-old compositions with an infectious new energy, courtesy of a level of self-confidence that can only be earned through years of performing them live.

You can hear it in the smaller details, such as the way he bends his voice around lines like “I don’t care about money” on Higher Ground, making it audibly clear that he isn’t here to deliver these songs by the numbers, but to finally make them his own.

That is where The Calton Songs becomes much more interesting than a traditional unplugged record.

Because by this point in their career, the Scottish rockers had actually performed more gigs fronted by Dante than Rankin. As such, these tracks no longer feel borrowed from a bygone era — instead, for the first time on record, they sound like they genuinely belong to the version of Gun that’s been playing them for the last ten years.

"I don't care about money, I just pray for time."

HIGHER GROUND

A Few Rough Edges

Not every experiment produces an upgrade.

Frantic is the most obvious weak spot, largely because there’s not enough distance between the original 2015 version and the updated one.

The stripped-back format also inevitably removes some of what Gun do best.

Steal Your Fire was never going to hit as hard without the full electric assault of the original, and listeners who found the band via Giuliano Gizzi’s iconic guitar work may occasionally find themselves waiting for an explosion that never arrives.

Of course, this criticism would be far stronger if The Calton Songs was treated as a replacement for the originals.

It isn’t.

This is merely an alternate route through the band’s back-catalogue, and their willingness to substantially change their biggest songs is exactly why it sounds so alive.

Not Everything Hits The Mark

There are only a few moments where The Calton Songs feels less than essential.

The clearest is Frantic (2022) — a modern-era track that doesn’t shift dramatically enough from its 2015 original to justify taking up space on a project whose appeal lies in fresh perspective. It isn’t bad, it’s simply redundant.

The other caveat is the format itself. Stripped-back, acoustic-leaning arrangements will always remove some of what Gun do best — the crunch, the weight, the physical impact of their riffs — but as a side project rather than a full studio statement, the trade-off feels acceptable.

After all, this isn’t trying to replace the classic records, merely offering an alternate lens.

As for the lone “new” song, Backstreet Brothers, it plays its role well: less a bold new direction than a neat epilogue. Even better, the band have stated that the track had existed in some form for years and simply hadn’t been recorded until now — which makes it feel like a recovered footnote rather than an awkward add-on.

Gun – The Calton Songs

All things considered, The Calton Songs is a success.

It might not provide listeners with a raft of new material, but it accomplishes two important things: it gives Dante Gizzi an official stamp on Gun’s classic catalogue, and it helped push the band back into creative motion after the pandemic had brought everything to a halt.

There’s also something admirable about the way Gun approached the project. Reworking your best-known songs is always going to invite comparison with the originals, but rather than play things safe, they commit fully to the idea and give these tracks genuinely different identities.

But perhaps the highest compliment I can pay The Calton Songs is to point out that newer fans encountering these hits in their 2022 form may well end up preferring them to the original versions.