BIG COUNTRY

BIG COUNTRY (Midnight at the Olympia)

I STOOD out like a sore thumb. Minus a check shirt, minus an air guitar and minus the genitals that seemed almost a precondition to membership of the Big Country fan club.

With 90% of the audience male - and on the lookout for some serious male bonding rituals amid the sloped inclines of the Olympia I felt like a eunuch in a brothel - entertained, yes; distracted, definitely; but a tad surplus to the requirements. This was a boys' night out and who was I to sully their caper with my testosterone-less observations?

Hormonally theirs, I was no - but spiritually our paths converged more than once. These guys have had an unplanned low profile for the last few years. After 1991's slingshot at the American Hot 100 that seriously misfired ('No Place Like Home') Stuart Adamson and Co. have retrained their sights towards home with this year's 'The Buffalo Skinners' and by the looks of it they've picked up a chord or two from Kurt Cobain to muddy the pristine bagpiped sound of old. (Which also went to prove that his apprenticeship with The Skids didn't go astray.)

The ancient singles stood up admirably to close scrutiny: 'Look Away' cajoled the majority into a bonding frenzy that'd be the envy of even the huggiest of teams in Tolka Park. 'Ships', a power ballad for the cigarette-lighter brigade (yes, they were here too) leapt seamlessly from the duetted 12 strings of Adamson and Bruce Watson and 'Chance', a Careless Whisper in tartan, stood head and shoulders above everything, resplendent in its very own melodrama fit for a Lady Macbeth.

Adamson has lost nothing apart from his spiketop. Looking like a lean Simon Le Bon with a lawnmower haircut he thrashed and boogied across the stage like a true novice with fire in his veins and ants in his pants.

And just when I thought I'd got the perfect handle on them, they went and blew up all the cosy comparisons with an encore that had us all flipping through our mental card indexes in search of unlikely mentors and heroes. Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well' was invigorated with a magnificent Phil Spector-ish wall of sound; Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock' was lovingly caressed like a repentant adolescent converted to the joys of Matthews Southern Comfort after years of uninterrupted Nirvana.

And then all that was left was 'In A Big Country'. Dreams stay with you. And then they return when you least expect them. An unheralded treat.

• Siobhan Long