RANDY NEWMAN

RANDY NEWMAN (National Stadium, Dublin)

TO USE anything more flashy than a three syllable word in a Randy Newman review would be a travesty. (Phew, see – almot got caught out already). Seeing as how he’s managed to cover everything from US foreign policy to labyrinthine (OK – can’t I be allowed just a teensy weensy bit of leeway here? Please?) tales of Faustian pacts in two, it hardly seems apt to plough through the thesaurus for suitable plaudits, does it?

Anyway, the long and the short of it is – Newman’s a genius, a wit, a satirist without equal. In the Stadium, that laser-sharp tongue slashed through the padding and the candy floss with precision engineering and there were more than a handful who’d have relished a tincture with which to grease the printing presses that whirred into action to record Albert’s demise as Mr. Newman spoke.

With as sharp a sense of timing as of caricature he lampooned everything and everyone in sight – including us, his ‘premier’ audience – as if we fell for that one. Pah!

‘Christmas In Capetown’ was, he assured us, executed with both the black and the white keys of his grand piano, unlike that fondly-loved, diabetic, comatosed duet of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. So too his antidote to Live Aid, ‘I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do’ – and it did, right at the centre of both funny bones, actually.

And so it went. Alabama blues bars (‘Baltimore’) mingled with cool Big Apple jazz (‘The Land Of Dreams’) in a curious melting pot fired purely by voice and piano. It was a sound that sucked us suckers in; helpless, willing recipients of his wonderful blasphemies.

No-one else sings such pristine three-minute love songs with a cringe factor of zero. No-one else could chance a paean to the Yellow Man and come up grinning and unbruised. And who else would even dream of coupling physics with psychiatry in a song title, for God’s sake, whatever about burying strange references in the bridge or the final chorus. ‘Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation Of Albert Einstein In America’ does just that with not a whit of bother.

And so does Randy Newman. Then again with a gene pool that touches the heights of medicine and music, wouldn’t you too? One of the gigs of the year. Sucker if you missed it!

• Siobhán Long