BOY GEORGE

 

Oh dear. Can it really only be me who has niggles after these nights out? I try to put my age aside and imagine how I'd have felt when I was 20. Maybe then I wouldn't have minded temporary deafness after a concert but I don't think even at that age I'd have expected to have my eardrums assaulted at a Boy George event. As it was we couldn't pick out a word of any of his songs or catch any of the, presumably witty, asides between songs. That was such a shame. He has a sweet melodic voice and that's what we'd gone along to hear but it was at least 30 seconds into each tune before we could recognise what it was - the speakers killed the whole evening. The best of the repertoire was Hare Krishna and that was because he joined forces with the backing singers to belt out the lines. My husband needn't have worried about standing out in the audience - the majority in the circle were our age while the "boppers" downstairs were in their 30s.

The only good thing about the noise level was that we couldn't distinguish any of the self-penned songs sung by the support act - Declan someone. Because he'd written the things himself we had no way of knowing whether they were good or bad but then he came to the finale - his version of Dire Straits' "Romeo and Juliet" - one of my all time favourites. He murdered it and then stamped on its grave. Shocking. At one point he apologised in advance for the swear words in his next song - he needn't have bothered because no-one could make out a single word, in fact to start with I thought, judging by his name, that he was singing in Irish.