Vigorous, immediate, likeable, energetic. Melanie C's performance tonight is everything that 'Reason' - the album it promotes - is not. About as popular with the public as SARS, though a great deal less infectious, 'Reason' seemed to show a bright star swallowed in a MOR black hole.
Tonight's performance isn't enough to atone for that particular criminal act, but it does show that Melanie C's rehabilitation isn't impossible. Her bold decision to shun digital tape and surround herself with a tight live band pays off. Most mainstream pop stars, shorn of the expensive FM production of their albums, flounder when performing live. Melanie C blooms in the space it gives her to improvise and flex her impressive vocal muscles.
And as a host, Melanie C is faultless, filling up the Shepherd's Bush Empire with her surprisingly buoyant mood and chatty asides. "Tonight is the thirteenth show,"she announces early on,"and I refuse to make it unlucky". The positive sentiment may be pure LA but the delivery is hardcore Scouse.
'Melt' - a rare highlight of the new album - sounds much better in this setting, its lovely, lilting tune contrasting beguilingly with her jagged voice. 'Positively Somewhere' overcomes its clichés - no small feat - to achieve the kind of soft rock breeziness that might have graced a seventies Fleetwood Mac album. Sadly, nothing can save 'Soul Boy', a song so torpid and dreary that Seal would have rejected it as a b-side.
But it's the older material that best showcases the charm and energy that made Melanie C the most interesting of the Spice Girls. 'Never Gonna Be The Same Again' is a brilliantly spiky pop song, met with a slow clapping, arms aloft reception that may have given the singer flashbacks to her Wembley Stadium heyday.
Even better is when Melanie C rocks out, on tracks like 'Home' and the growly 'Baby When You're Gone'. And 'Goin' Down' - sneered at on its release - sounds fabulously ragged and angry live, Melanie C writhing on the stage full of a from-the-gut rage that Linkin Park can only daydream about.
Of course, for every hit there are at least three misses, from the sickly 'On The Horizon' to the sloppy cover of Stevie Wonder's 'I Wish'. But the most hopeful moment comes in the middle of one of the worst songs, 'If That Were Me'. As she sings the official worst-lyric-of-all-time - "I couldn't live without my phone/ But you don't even have a home" - Melanie C joins in giggling with the crowd at its banality.
A little more humour, and a lot more following of her instincts, and there might be life left in this girl yet.
