It was American Eccentrics night in Croydon, as Loudon Wainwright III blew into town with his old pal Peter Blegvad in support.
Blegvad characterised the pair of them as "writerly songwriters with a taste for dark humour", suggesting that he was the surrealist to Wainwright's realist. Fans of his Leviathan cartoons in the Independent on Sunday will probably know what he means.
They share Anglophile leanings, and each of them has seen enough of this country to have written songs about the shambolic state of the railways. Blegvad's songs also reflect a whimsical, word-gaming turn of mind. Hangman's Hill was a kind of adult nursery rhyme, and his tribute song to Lord Byron began from the premise that "Byron" shares several letters with "embryo".
Wainwright sprang from the wings with an air of boundless optimism not always detectable in his songs. In his grey trousers, white shirt and tie, with a pen clipped into his top pocket, he looked like a geography teacher from a rural college in Vermont.
However, he has the happy (albeit not particularly lucrative) gift for wrapping profound sentiments and sharp insights inside songs that can seem slight or trivial until you find yourself thinking about them days later.
His set was like a talking book exploring his whole life, covering his ancestry, his parents, problematic relationships and the prospect of death. He ponders over age and the way it turns you into your parents, so much so that he feels like his father's twin: "I couldn't kill him, it would be like suicide."
Heaven, he hopes, might be a place where you can indulge all the vices frowned upon on earth ("Smoking's allowed, that's what makes all those clouds"). Love affairs fail, the doctor is measuring him up for the morgue and teenagers are pirating his songs over the internet, but miraculously Wainwright is still standing upright. "Nice guys always finish last and there's none nicer than me," he reports acidly in The Last Man on Earth. But I don't think "nice" is really the word.
· Loudon Wainwright III plays the Colston Hall, Bristol (0117-922 3683), tonight, then tours.
