TOM ROBINSON

TOM ROBINSON (Whelan's, Dublin)

MR. ROBINSON alights onstage with a sartorial inelegance that not many would manage to pull off, though he, of course, does - with aplomb.

Whelan's is home for him. The crowd know his songs better than he does. So well in fact that some of them think it wise to drown the lyrics in a cacophony of drunken tête à têtes that irritate and annoy even the usually utterly convivial host. Still, he rushes headlong along the home straight, opting to resurrect the encores for starters and save the appetisers - the newer stuff - for after. Mr. Robinson's been to a Lou Reed gig and knows what it's like to bore holes in the listeners' ears with interminable new material so he's not going to subject us to the same penance.

Instead, we get the back catalogue, the newer arrivals and a handful of power covers that caught even the old stalwarts by surprise. John Wesley Harding's jolting tickle in the ribs of Live Aid, 'July 13th 1985' managed to catch everyone unawares at some stage; Jacques Brel's updated and transplanted 'Yuppie Scum' kicked dirt in every poser's face who cared to listen, and then a hopelessly romantic tale of Caruso heralded a power ballad that Robinson nicked from the Italian charts on one of his recent visits.

As for his own songs, it was lucky bag of his greatest hits; 'War Baby', saxophone-less yet shimmering on the back of his own guitar, the inevitable 'Martin', transforming the crowd into not-quite-so-young cockney rebels, and the beautiful 'Days That Changed The World', either a sociopolitical commentary on the last 25 years or a canny namechecking of the news headlines of the same period, depending on the processing power of your brain.

At time he looked like an overgrown offspring of the Brady Bunch, except they wouldn't dare to don black socks with their Reeboks. Then again he cut a dash as a protest singer with a voice and a sense of humour. And for someone at the back, he's "big Tom and I love you". Unrequited love. AIDS. Grey cortinas and the joys of being ambidextrous. Tom Robinson's still got the best of both worlds - and so had Whelan's.

• Siobhán Long