What’s the most romantic city on Earth? The most romantic city that any artist has imagined as a theatre of enchantment and heartbreak? You might say it is Woody Allen’s monochrome Manhattan or Robert Doisneau’s Paris. Or the London of the Kinks and ‘Waterloo Sunset’, where Terry meets Julie every Friday night’. Or is it in fact Glasgow? Yes, Glasgow.

The work of the Bathers can make you believe so. Kisses on tenement stairwells, Kelvingrove girls. It’s the music of those Glasgow evenings where the elusive sun can make a late appearance on the red sandstone tenements and suddenly that tough old imperial city feels like the perfect place to fall in love. And The Bathers provide the soundtrack.

The Bathers formed in the mid-eighties, after the break-up of singer-songwriter Chris Thomson’s former band Friends Again, releasing six albums before a long hiatus after Pandemonia in 1999. In 2016, Thomson re-formed the band for a handful of gigs. Then in 2023 came the release of Sirenesque, the first album of all-new material in just shy of a quarter-century. Just like fans of Glasgow’s other great purveyors of rainy romanticism, The Blue Nile, the happy few who love The Bathers have learned to be patient, though one suspects they were measured, sensitive yet undemonstrative types to begin with.

The band’s concert at The Lexington, in London, felt like a meeting of quietly thrilled members of an underground sect, eyeing one another as if to say ‘you like them too’? The Blue Nile are hardly household names but they have always had high-profile admirers, from Annie Lennox in the 1990s to Matty Healy of The 1975 today. They even received the ultimate accolade of a namecheck in a track on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets’ Department. By contrast, The Bathers have never sought nor come close to mainstream fame. And that seems to suit them – and their fans – just fine.

Thomson has always seemed wary of fame and on Sirenesque he speaks of how ‘Siren voices sing/ ‘We can make you a king’. The Bathers never got the rewards that others gleaned but then again they never got lured onto the rocks.

This is not the sound of the hard-as-nails working-class Glasgow of high rises and shoe-box bars, of James Kelman or Jeff Torrington, but rather of the well-dressed West End, all handsome Victorian tenements, the Botanic Gardens and Byres Road bars full of university folk. Thomson writes love songs to his city and its girls but is no parochialist. He has a fondness for placenames in all his songs, ranging away beyond the city, out to the Highlands and Islands and across Europe: Leiden, Venice, Florence.

There is an upwardly-mobile, aspirational quality to these songs: girls are called Saskia or Firmina; there are references to the actress Ornella Mutti, to Proust, Mahler, Rembrandt and Nabokov. This was all heady, irresistible stuff to a bookish young man like me in the mid-1990s, reading too much and imagining European love affairs that hadn’t happened but still just might. Yes, some might call it pretentious. Yet there has always been something refreshing about The Bathers and their unapologetically highbrow approach, the lack of a need to prove authenticity by rocking-out and dumbing-down.

The piano tends to lead in much of the Bathers recorded work, with keening strings, subtle splashes of female backing vocals and even full-blown soprano warbling from Liz Fraser of The Cocteau Twins on Sunpowder. Sirenesque features glorious string arrangements by Este Visser and the Scottish Session Orchestra.

But in the tiny space of the Lexington’s upstairs room, Thomson played acoustic guitar throughout, accompanied just by lead guitar, bass and drums, with drummer Hazel Morrison providing stunning backing vocals. Hearing these songs without the string arrangements and piano was initially startling, like seeing your sharp-suited boss in weekend hoodie and jeans, but it was a revelation, as wide-screen epics such as Sirenesque were re-presented as tight, infectious pop songs. Lead guitarist Callum McNair provided delicate, subtle playing and it was a surprisingly and delightfully spirited – maybe even raucous – affair at times.

It’s a reminder that Thomson has always written straight-out, guitar-led songs like ‘Never Too Late’, ‘She’s Gone Forever’ and ‘If Love Could Last Forever’ that are reminiscent of the best cerebral Glaswegian pop of Lloyd Cole and The Commotions, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Belle and Sebastian and indeed Friends Again.

Thomson and the band played as if these songs, some of them forty years old but rarely performed of late, still feel box-fresh exciting to them. Thomson’s trademark wistful growl is reminiscent of Tom Waits, with occasional echoes of David Bowie (listen to the young Thomson on Friends Again’s 1984 LP Trapped and Unwrapped), but, live, there’s an avuncular warmth to it too.

The crowd, among them ex-pat Glaswegians, went away into a London Sunday night moved and happy, re-connected to their decades-ago loves, joys and pains. It is never too late.

‘Sirenesque’ by The Bathers is available now.