Morcheeba have a new singer. Perhaps Skye Edwards's thin sigh of a voice finally proved too insubstantial and she evaporated into the ether. In her place - startling in livid strawberry pink ruffles and with RP schoolgirl vowels - is someone who could only have been called Daisy. Daisy Martey used to sing with Noonday Underground, who released two albums of intriguingly off-kilter psychedelic soul; tonight is her first public appearance with her new employers and she struggles to find her voice. Essaying new, unrecorded songs, she doesn't know when to belt and when to beguile, coming off as horribly green and struggling to pitch at all. The new songs are like the old songs: bits of folk, jazz, bossa nova, soul and distant echoes of hip-hop in a workmanlike collage. One day, perhaps, genre will be obsolete and all music will be like this: an opiate of exquisite dullness.
The stars are out for Lee Hazlewood: Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, Jason Pierce from Spiritualized, Travis's Fran Healy, and a coterie of lesser scenesters. A hitmaker from the 1950s till the early 1970s, Hazlewood is too mischievous to be thought of as part of the establishment; he recently celebrated his 75th birthday, counter-cultural cache intact.
Backed by a band that counts among its number three High Llamas and one of Stereolab, plus strings and brass - a marked improvement on his last visit when the sound was swamped by cheap-sounding synth parts - he plays a brisk, understated set largely avoiding obvious hits. That's fine, because lesser-known work such as the gorgeous, funereal For One Moment (pretty much the fall of a heavy broacade curtain in song) is every bit the equal of his tremulous signature tune Some Velvet Morning, which appears tantalisingly briefly in an encore medley of hits. Imagine Johnny Cash with added Chaucerian ribaldry and you're close to Hazlewood's territory. His version of Whole Lotta Shakin' is so slow and low it might be a Northern Line train, and even the men in the audience seems a little flustered afterwards.
But he's not always winking: A Young Girl's Mind - Moon River for hamfisted but good-hearted cowpokes, is skin-prickingly melancholy.
In these songs love is both an elemental force ranging across America's mythic emptinesses and a lowdown, devious, deviant thing, acquainted with excess of every kind. Hazlewood, the beloved entertainer, the wry seducer, is American pop culture's heart of darkness in a Vegas suit.
