Although Colin MacIntyre claims that there are no record shops on the isle of Mull, that doesn't appear to have prevented him from squeezing a small encyclopedia of pop into his songwriting.
Abba and the Beatles, the Hollies and Aztec Camera, Bowie and the Beach Boys can all be heard scrambling around in the rafters of his multicoloured songs, with Prefab Sprout and the Housemartins in hot pursuit. Deprived of such distractions as shopping malls and football stadiums, MacIntyre has taken a magnifying glass to his Hebridean homeland instead, allowing him to develop a musical perspective that- despite its obvious borrowings - can claim to be unique.
The prolific MacIntyre has just delivered the second instalment of his ongoing personal saga, Us, and has reconvened his Historical Society to help him deliver it to a live audience. There is barely room in the CD booklet to list all the instruments he plays in the studio, but on stage he confined himself to keyboards and half a dozen guitars. His band worked hard in support, lashing themselves to a pseudo-punk frenzy in Gravity and whipping up an art-rock drone in Clones, but it would be pointless to pretend that this is anything but a vehicle for the leader's quirks and obsessions.
As he mulls over Mull, MacIntyre often comes back to the conflict between the private citizen and various kinds of corporatism. One track on the new album, The Supermarket Strikes Back, is the second instalment of the story he began in Barcode Bypass on the debut album, Loss, about the death of the local grocery store at the hands of impersonal mega-retailers. Minister for Genetics and Insurance MP (yes, it's a song title) is a Mull's-eye-view of state bureaucracy, rendered in tones of fretful minimalism.
At the Empire, in a fit of irrational exuberance, MacIntyre launched into a solo mini-set at the piano for an encore - which would have been OK had he not dragged it out into a paroxysm of under-rehearsed and painfully elongated soul-baring. (If he wants to play us his demos, why doesn't he stick them on the internet?) However, pop can always use a bit of wilful eccentricity.
· At the Limelight, Belfast, tonight. Box office: 028-9032 5968. Then touring.
