Review: John Harle/Marc Almond, Barbican Hall. Ignore the prog-rock pretension. Almond is a joy.

Funny how quickly you forget the makeup of the average highbrow pop concert. It’s 96 per cent male, obviously, and very partial to a receding hairline-ponytail combo; last night’s performance by saxophonist and composer John Harle and former Soft Cell singer Marc Almond brought these types out to the Barbican in force. They were here to see The Tyburn Tree, a psychogeographical song cycle (!) based around  London folklore and mysticism. Thus, whatever the evening promised, a degree of mass chin-stroking was inevitable.

The audience sat down to complain about the quality of the craft beer on offer to their imaginary girlfriends, and the band began to tune up. This went on for a very, very long time. Finally, though, the overture to the performance began. John Harle parped his way through a preliminary set of jazz rock that sounded somewhere between Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner and a 1970s cereal commercial.