Don Williams (right) being compared with Jim Reeves isn't all that bad, but Kenny Rogers? Don Williams, the so-called Gentle Giant of pop-style country balladry (aka Countrypolitan) was big business in the Seventies, but as country music styles began to encompass rougher and tougher directions, his crooning, horizontally-inclined vocalising started to sound distinctly out of place and out of time. Williams' hitmaking days on this side of the Atlantic petered out in 1976, but he continued to chart in the US with his bathetically romantic material, his mixture of pop schmoozing and country sentiment an appealing and durable entity, if somewhat anachronistic. He plays two nights (next Tuesday and Wednesday, at 8pm) at Dublin's Olympia Theatre. Don't expect to break into a sweat.
Tony Clayton-Lea