Her record company had spent the day warning everybody that she would be on stage at 9pm, not 9.15pm as advertised, but in the end Macy Gray finally tottered from the wings at 9.35pm. Perhaps it was all part of her back-to-the-1970s vibe, when dangly earrings and an afro the size of an H-bomb were all the rage, and concerts never started on time.
Gray's show is an unusual mixture of polish and chaos, with her seven-piece band stomping up a storm in the best bits, then sounding unaccountably listless and ramshackle in between. Sometimes they recalled the psychedelic heyday of Sly Stone; other times there were vivid flashbacks to Prince, like the ballad Still, which is basically Nothing Compares 2 U with Gray's croak where Prince's falsetto should be.
Her hit I Try, saved until last as a singalong show-stopper, was the most boring song of the night, dragging along listlessly instead of blossoming into the big anthem it was evidently intended to be. But for most of the first hour, the band frequently cranked up the pressure by peeling the songs open, hoisting out a giant riff and charging into a funk frenzy.
Propelled by freewheeling drums, thick wedges of organ and piano and some extra beats from the DJ, they sounded raw and loose, admirably free from airbrushed superstar polish. Sexual Revolution blended seamlessly into a chunk of Funkadelic's One Nation Under a Groove, while Oblivion, where the guitarist held up the lyrics on big sheets of cardboard, crashed around like a truck with no brakes.
Between songs, and for that matter during most of them, Gray talked about sex. "All the girls in the house!" she yelled out. "All the ladies in the house! All the ho's in the house! We're gonna celebrate the dick! " (cue catcalls and wolf-whistles). She urged the audience to remove bits of their clothing, promising that if we did, they would too. Soon the guitarist was shirtless, and Gray and the bass player had their trousers around their ankles.
Whether Gray can actually sing remains a moot point, since her voice is mostly a low-register rasp you could use to file through prison bars. But if you're looking for a loud mouth and heaps of attitude, you'll have all her albums already.
· At the Academy, Birmingham, on June 4. Box office: 0121-262 3000. Then touring.
