Imelda May Tickets

Perched on 6 inch heels, you would have expected Imelda May to play up to her torch singing ways and croon seductively into a stationary microphone all night. Wrong. May could have very well been wearing track shoes as she ripped the mike from its stand and worked the stage and a surprisingly older audience for the duration, daring her band to keep up to the frantic pace being set. Keep up they did as May ripped through a 90 minute set made up mostly from material from her first two albums mixed in with a few choice classics. A traditional stand-up bass kept time while a horn-player multi-instrumentalist puctuated the tunes with colour and texture as was the case with 'Kentish Town Waltz', a traditional sounding Irish song penned by May and could very well be a standard for years to come. May decked out in a black-and-white print dress with a bat (the flying kind, not the baseball kind) motif had the audience eating from the palm of her hand and enjoyed toying with them as the evening went along. Sing-alongs were loud and enthusiastic and the Irish songstress donning plastic skull necklace and bracelets took the opportunity to see just how far she could push the crowd. Following along became increasingly difficult as May kept upping the ante go from easy lyrics to harder and harder vocal runs. Pushing to the point of no return, the audience just roared with approval when it became clear they weren't able to keep up. Just how strong she is vocally became clear during one such encounter where May stepped beyond the power of her microphone and just sang al fresco, without amplication. Those within the first few rows quickly realized that this girl who could wail like a banshee had a voice that was golden and pure. May as she has demonstrated on her recordings was able to step out beyond the often confining limititations of rock-a-billy and push things far beyond. The Stray Cats, Elvis or anybody in between could never put out more than a handful of recordings that leant itself to the restraints of the gendre and May has ponied up many original tunes of her own but has also gone far beyond the restricting art-form including a modern gospel inspired Humble and Proud. In-between song banter became less and less as the evening progressed as May let loose with her most popular songs to end the night including the title track to her most recent CD, Mayhem in an all-out assault blowing the roof off the two-tiered venue. A deafening roar brought May back for a final two songs where the Irish songstress covered Tainted Love and Elvis Presley's My Baby Left Me.