It was hardly the best circumstances for a performance of acoustic guitar music: one of Glasgow’s coolest clubs, a clientele of hip kids and a start time of 11pm. The only thing missing was a beatnik hobo guitar player in a trilby…

It was probably the least appropriate setting I could think of to see one third of the legendary and nefarious Sun City Girls. It’s a mystery to me why Bishop would be of any interest to a club crowd and, conversely, why would anyone interested in Bishop want to hang out in a club to see him? That said, the Optimo Dj’s did their best to set the mood. With the glitter ball casting psychedelic light through the smoke, the unsuspecting audience was greeted with a brace of esoteric sounds that ran from Nurse With Wound’s clanking, metallic Thunder Perfect Mind to Johnny Cash songs, old folk blues numbers and wailing far eastern music, a perverse selection worthy of the Girls themselves.

When Bishop finally hit the stage, he announced he only had 30 minutes to play his set! It was a testament to his frankly stupendous guitar playing that this turned out to be a rousing success and the sort of event that immediately joins your list of gigs that made your life worth living.

Bishop (alongside Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, Ben Chasney and Steffan Basho Junghans) is drawing a whole new audience to a style of exploratory instrumental guitar playing that was nearly extinct a decade ago. There are echoes of John Fahey’s American primitive guitar stylings, welding jazz, blues and folk influences, fusing them with global styles including everything from Indian ragas to Spanish flamenco.

Bishop has a driving, percussive style of playing that draws on old school values-talent, discipline, imagination-that might, in less capable hands, come over as plain showy. But below the bravura, his music is infused with the grit of real invention and ferocious energy.

With so little time on his hands he played a remarkable amount of material. With strings buzzing like electric power lines, he ripped through Sun City Girls favourites and selections from his own albums.  Knarled blues riffs met bluegrass flatpicking, flamenco segued into middle eastern folk, fx pedals generated bewildering walls of noise and blizzards of percussive strumming. Space Prophet Dogon (from the Sun City Girls legendary album Torch of The Mystics) divorced from its wailing vocals and rolling percussion backing, became a stately, Fahey-esque hymn. Esoterica of Abyssinia (from the same album) was delivered with foot stomping urgency, its knotty riffs and stop/start tempos drenched in the blues.

The finale was a huge, raga-like piece (unnamed though I think it came from Improvika) delivered with literally string snapping ferocity. Building up a stupendous drone with feedback and pedals, Bishop interlaced twanging overtones and fluid melodies, gradually increasing the pace until his fingers were a dizzying blur of lead lines and chopped up chords. I remember seeing Ravi Shankar play like this, using tension and release to create waves of increasing intensity, heading for a blazing climax. Bishop upped the tempo until rhythm and melody blurred together. Pausing only to retune, he rocked and swayed in his chair, tearing off licks and runs and accompanying himself in a call and response dialogue that reminded me of John McLaughlin’s blistering interplay with Shakti. Finally, completely absorbed in the moment, he literally flayed the strings from his instrument. With drones buzzing and steel whipping around his ears he finished with a flourish, announcing his return with Sun City Girls at the forthcoming Instal festival and again with a 2006 European tour.