Manchester Academy, 27 March 2011.

I didn’t much like Cee Lo’s solo album, THE LADY KILLER, and the song that sank a thousand ships - ‘Forget/Fuck You’. Rather like Rihanna’s most recent runnaway success, I felt the material was feather-lightweight and rather meaningless - great Radio 1 fodder. So what the hell am I doing driving 40 miles down the M56 to Manchester to see Cee Lo? Well, I do like Gnarls Barkley music, especially classic single ‘Crazy’ and the last album (which actually didn’t sell well) THE ODD COUPLE. I arrived at the Academy to find yet another major show which would have been sold-out last year but in 2011 is struggling to fill the venue.

Cee Lo was due on at 8:50 after a support act called Ebony. But who are Ebony? I’m still none the wiser despite a Google search for one of the more unusual acts seen this or any other year. Five guys wandered onto the stage wearing rather eerie bright red face masks like something out of a midnight satanic sacrificial ceremony. One of the band manned the keyboards while two provided backing vocals, one sat behind his drums while the other with face paint manned the guitar. After a lengthy intro a female figure bounds onto the stage wearing a fake and very green-grass outfit topped by a massive curly head of hair.

Frankly I couldn’t understand what was going on although whatever it was was quite rhythmic and ‘danceable’. From the look of it the audience was a bit confused also relying as they did on instructions coming from the players. It was all quite weird and even included a costume change mid-set which signalled a much darker musical ambience. Looking at my watch I could see that Ebony had run well over their scheduled time by ten minutes meaning of course that Cee Lo would be late.

By 9:20 the audience was becoming decidadly restless and before long chants of “Cee Lo, Cee Lo” echoed through the joint followed by slow handcaps and loud boos. Eventually, after set-list changes and a delay of forty minutes Cee Lo’s four-piece lady band enters dressed in clinging red, low-cut jump suits that seemed painted on - sexy enough for the men in the audience to stop complaining and look… Cee Lo eventually emerged with matching red T-shirt with the bold black words John, Paul, George, Ringo… and I wondered whether he thought he was actually playing in Liverpool.

I discovered after the show that Cee Lo had a cold which shortened the length of the performance to just one hour while signalling changes to the set-list. However, while the more ‘challenging’ songs may have been missing Cee Lo proved that even with a cold he could out-sing most of his contempories with ‘Lady Killer Theme’ and a stunning ‘Bright Lights, Bigger City’. Cee Lo’s ladies gave the night a rocky and sexy feel (see photos) while the fional set-list happily included several Gnarls BarKley favourites including ‘Crazy’, ‘Run’, ‘Smiley Faces’ and ‘Gone Daddy Gone’.

Given the time constraints the set-list was excellent with ‘Fuck You’ receiving a chorus of approval from the audience before a quite beautiful cover of ‘Perfect Day’ closed the show. This certainly wasn’t the great man at his very best but he deserved browny points for effort and left his adoring audience happy. ‘Job done’ as they say…

SET-LIST

Intro, Lady Killer Theme, Bright Lights Bigger City, Cho Cha, Champagne, Bodies, Wildflower, I Want You, Satisfied, Crazy, Run, Cry Baby, Smiley Faces, Fuck You, Perfect Day.