91Èȱ¬

So, in the spirit of last time, here are the Amazing Things I discovered while going to watch Rufus do his big-chin ponce-pop thing last night...

Amazing Thing 1: Sometimes a little art can be a dangerous thing. While Rufus Wainwright is amazing at proper grown-up songwriting, with clever lyrical twists and cleverly applied harmonies and dense musical structure and all sorts of other things you can only learn in music school...he's got an awful lot of grindingly slow songs about statues and stuff. Well, they might not be about statues so much, but they're so bloody slow and weighty, they might as well be made of stone. The good stuff is proper brilliant, mind.

Amazing Thing 2: Rufus had Hot Chip for his support act. A strange choice, given that Hot Chip are the band that gave the world that song that goes "overandoverandoverandoverandover like a monkeywithaminiaturecymbal", and Rufus is the man who gave the world poncing about like Oscar Wilde and generally acting like a good strong bass drum would make him faint clean away. Thankfully this isn't true, and it was briiliant to watch the people for whom Rufus Wainwright represents the most aggressive, shouty, atonal and generally challenging item on their CD shelf muttering about how much babysitting money they were wasting being deafened by this 'noise'. Sum 41 would KILL for a reception like that to be punkrock in.

Amazing Thing 3: '14th Street' by Rufus Wainwright. That's a tune. Even when the singer is wearing lederhosen...

Amazing Thing 4: Rufus is better at talking in between songs than James Morrison. However, his Cornish accent is even more unconvincing than David Walliams' Welsh accent. It seems there's not a lot of camp, nasal, New York-inflected elements to the archetypal Cornish burr. Who knew?

Amazing Thing 5: There is no finer way for a gentleman to end his concert than for him to appear in a ladies' suit jacket, tights and no trousers, diamante earrings and bright red lipstick, and then do a run through of Judy Garland's 'Get Happy'. Linkin Park, take note...

Amazing Thing 6: On the way back out again, I stopped to have a quick nosey at the miscellaneous items which had been confiscated on the way into the concert. Now, regular gig-goers will confirm that if anyone ever has stuff taken off them on the way into a concert, it's only ever going to be bottles of drink. Either glass bottles because people have been known to throw those at Panic! At The Disco - even if Panic! At The Disco aren't even playing, and therefore injuring whichever poor soul actually IS on stage - or because you can only drink the drinks the venue sells inside. And pay for the privilege, actually...

Now, Eden is not like other venues. So although there were a lot of bottles on the table, they were all labelled with the name of the owners, so they could be picked up again afterwards. And they were by no means the only items to have been put to one side. Chief among the pile of dangerous cack next to the bottles, was a great big adult pogo stick.

Seriously. A pogo stick. I mean WHO takes a pogo stick to a gig? And, more than that, who takes a pogo stick to a RUFUS WAINWRIGHT GIG?

I've no idea if pogo sticks are illegal at Eden concerts or not, but I'm very pleased to see that security staff are attuned to the special requirements of the artists who are performing.

Which means that when Amy Winehouse performs there next week, I fully expect to see all the bottles being let in, AND the pogo sticks, but there being a total ban on buns, fruit-juice, coffee percolators and traffic cones.

Let's see, shall we? Same time next week?

Full concert details - plus actual close-up pics - at the 91Èȱ¬ Cornwall website...

More ChartBlog reports from Eden:
Lily Allen...
Amy Winehouse...
James Morrison...