Review: The Good, The Bad And The Queen, Leeds Irish Centre

8:50am Friday 2nd February 2007

THE last time he passed this way, Damon Albarn was fronting Blur on a distant festival hill at Bramham Park.

If the choice of the Leeds Irish Centre for his return raised one eyebrow, the fairground music and the waxed moustachioed master of ceremonies raised the other, but it all made sense.

Albarn is breaking the pop mould over and again, as the David Bowie of his age, and this was to be a night at the music hall - up the road from the City Varieties - with bunting, union flag and all.

The MC introduced unfunny jugglers and the New Cross sound of bluegrass from sepia-tinted Indigo Moss.

That was before a dub reggae interlude seamlessly wove in the second musical component, of the multi-cultural The Good, The Bad And The Queen.

The grandiloquent MC had his final grandstand moment, heralding the arrival of former Verve guitarist Simon Tong, Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, a female string quartet, and the still cool Clash bassist Paul Simonon, cigarette aglow, pork pie hat a-jaunty, as he took up his post by an amp bearing the apt message More Fire.

Albarn joined them in artful dodger's top hat and dark suit, and if the initial look was redolent of the Rolling Stones' Rock'n'Roll Circus, this was more its Weimar cabaret cousin - Albarn slunk low at a piano, or becoming increasingly theatrical at the front, as the album of mournful London decay made its way down the Thames in sequence.

Songs were stretched, dubbed up by Simonon's tactile bass, and thick as fog with atmosphere.

Still a concert, rather than conceptual art, this brilliantly-realised snapshot of thoroughly modern Britain ended with an encore sung, not by Albarn, but by "a man from Syria".