We are witnessing a revelation, a quiet revolution of words and music. A Wildean genius for narrative, a talent for heartbreak and irony. Carrying it all as unassumingly and as comfortably as the stripy scarves that adorn the necks of tonight's players and guest singers, diminutive multi-instrumentalist Stephin Merritt and his band of intellectual troubadours take our brains captive and ply our ears with seduction.
For Stephin, who's named his dog after Irving Berlin and has written an album of sixty nine love songs (called, er, '69 Love Songs'), life is a Broadway show, a never ending romantic musical of 'Busby Berkeley Dreams' and Coal Porter songcraft. Tenderness, as Marc Almond tells us, is a weakness, but for Merritt, who spikes it with cynicism, whose soft words are stabbed by sharp wit, whose couples never make it to the sunset, it's less a weakness than an opportunity to exercise a half satiric passion for unusual instrumentation and a criminally overdeveloped capacity for Coward-like dry humour. "The book of love is long and boring" he begins, strumming a ukelele on 'The Book Of Love', and the otherwise reverentially hushed audience of bespectacled intellectuals titters, "but I love it when you read to me".
Every lyric, clad in Merritt's deepest, darkest Neil Hannon textured velvet or in keyboardist Claudia Gorson's arch knowingness, is eminently quotable, every well-turned phrase worthy of recollection, whether self parody ("I could dress in black and read Camus/Smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth/...But I don't want to get over you"), a sensitive effusion of love, genre pastiche ('Papa Was A Rodeo') or epigrammatic reflection ("The night you can't remember/Is the night I can't forget"). This non-na(t)ive New Yorker's two minute portraits are more varied than the West End's entire cast, a chameleonic display of personality and situation.
His guest-sung compositions (released under the 'The 6ths' monicker) , which are dropped in the set like multicoloured bird's eggs into another's warm nest seem to penetrate their vocalists creativity: and while penning a Neil Hannon-like ditty isn't too hard when you already sound like his cousin, writing for Marc Almond can't have been so easy. Yet the Spanish-flavoured, sleazy 'Volcana!' which Almond sings swathed in the air of a washed up dilettante (although not swathed in neckwear), could have sidled straight out of Torment and Toreros.
What with the guest singers, the quiet, the scarves and the scholarly looking audience, this evening has the air of a slightly precious private party, a secret event for those with the right code. And, as we all know, exclusivity never did anyone any good. So throw off the weight of populism, the formulaic, easily consumable mass that we, too often unaware of an alternative, unquestioningly accept, and gatecrash.
