"Suzanne Vega's really cool! Atomic Kitten like her! She was the lead singer of the Bangles!"
A teenage girl attired in one of Top Shop's finest pink cardigans, is in the Shepherd's Bush bar-area, trying to explain to her two friends exactly why they've been dragged away from an evening in their rooms, texting each other dirty messages about Lee from Blue.
However, if anyone's expecting 'Eternal Flame', a morass of big hair and the whole crowd erupting to perform King Tut-style dance manoeuvres, they're going to be sorely disappointed.
Suzanne Vega. She's famous for being a folk singer from Greenwich Village, having a few kooky hits in the 1980s which all had titles of weird girls' names, and for getting tetchy with dance remixers DNA when they provided her with her biggest-ever hit with 'Tom's Diner'. Oh yeah. And she invented Alanis Morisette as well.
Suzanne arrives on stage looking like a herring fisherman, wearing what is probably a Pac-a-mac and an industrial-strength sou'wester. Once she takes her hat off, she looks like the bastard hybrid of Tori Amos, The Word's Katie Pucrick (remember her?) and that Pete Burns transexual who scared everybody witless on Never Mind the Buzzcocks the other week. After a "it's good to be here" type spiel, she then launches into her debut 1986 hit, 'Marlene On the Wall'. Which rocks. Kind of.
She then utters the words: "I'd like to tell you a little story," and then breaks off into a five-minute soliloquy about her breaking her left arm in a cycling accident, which also includes the sentence: "imagine if your poster had eyes and could see into your room and you're really small." Stop it Suzanne. You're scaring us.
It's like having some cranky aunt over from Utica, New York, who sits in your living room for two weeks and babbles on about what she dreamt about last night. But the little Vega-ettes, dotted at various points round the auditorium, love it. These are women in their mid-twenties, who go to gigs on their own, and sport geometric fringes in homage to their hero. They laugh sycophantically to every anecdote and hang on to every morsel of Vega-hewn psychobabble as if it's the Holy Scriptures, Koran and Shastra rolled into one. When Suzanne regales them with a story about something "being made of glass, like an eyeball", they all exclaim: "she's sooooo right!" in unison.
Then Vega mutters something about performing songs from her new album. Cue much Celtic-tinged, folksy dribble about "harbour walls" and "soldiers knocking at the police door." Meanwhile her reverential fans close their eyes and mouth along to every interminable lyric. When she finishes one song, a Vega-ette in Dierdrie-from-Coronation-Street specs moans: "ooooh yes," as if recalling a favourite orgasm.
Suzette then returns to the older hits. She gets all lyrical about Liverpool, the spiritual home of Cilla Black. There's a song called 'Caramel', during which twenty-something (and there are a lot of them here) couples smooch each other awkwardly. And then there's 'Tom's Diner', which induces the kind of clapping movements not seen since Bill Gates decided to throw a party for his Microsoft IT staff.
But the weird thing is, Suzanne is not like the majority of her fans. She's not a shrinking violet. Or frail or wan or shy or retiring. She's got a sexy voice and is charismatic enough to keep a crucible of geeks rapt for an hour-and-a-half. And the incandescent arpeggios emitted by her Boris Johnson look-a-like guitarist gives her songs a lovely, lilting feel.
For a fun night out and on-stage banter, look no further than Vegas. That's Johnny or 'Las' and not Suzanne.
