Heineken Green Energy 2003: Beck

What the fuck is it about hecklers at Dublin gigs? From the moment, Beck Hansen takes the stage, all slacker smiles and easy humour, he is assailed by all sorts of inane comment: surely these muppets have friends to tell them that they’re not funny. That gripe aside, it’s a real treat to see the boy Hansen up close and personal, on a rare solo visit to these shores.

Kicking off with the sublime ‘Golden Age’, it’s clear that Beck is in fine fettle, looking almost elfin under the spotlights, although his pixie boots maybe took the image too far. A couple of songs in and he’s already burst into Tom Petty’s ‘Free Falling’, and regaled us with comical anecdotes from his early days singing at protest marches. A karaoke piano version of Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ sees the majority of the audience unsure whether to laugh uproariously or join in.

On record, it is sometimes easy for the quality of Beck’s singing to be lost amid the bells and whistles of post-production. Here, a combination of pristine sound quality and the pared-back nature of the performance allows the richness and emotion of his voice to take centre stage, nowhere moreso than on ‘Lost Cause’, whose melancholia has never sounded so sweet.

However, this is one white boy with serious soul leanings, as evidenced by the brilliant Hammond-led ‘Nicotine & Gravy’, when he starts to play with the beats and pieces of his Roland 303.

He straps on his electric guitar for the momentous ‘Loser’, an obvious highlight, as is a piano-led ‘Jackass’ and a hilarious run through Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me A River’. A stripped-to-the-bone ‘Where It’s At’ is extremely questionable musically but the audience don’t seem to care, lapping up his every utterance with feverish devotion.

On occasion, it can be like watching a kid playing with his toys straight through from Christmas morning to New Year’s Eve. But in the main, it’s fabulous entertainment, capped off by a spine-tingling version of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’, which sends everyone home in a mood of quiet celebration.