One gets the impression that folksy jazz warbler Madeleine Peyroux would make a great punk icon. Like Pete Doherty, she enjoys sabotaging her career - leaving the music biz after a hit debut album to busk on the streets for eight years, then going "missing" at the peak of her fame.
Like The Clash she shows a reluctance to appear on top-rated TV shows.
Like Kurt Cobain she punctuates songs by mumbling laconic one-liners, staring at the floor and leaving uncomfor t able silences. Like David Byrne at early Talking Heads gigs, she'll spend an age in between songs tuning her guitar in an obsessive manner.
While these admirably anarchic traits might earn her brownie points on the indie circuit, they seem a bit rude coming from a MOR crooner, one whose material comprises ancient jazz standards.
Even these she sometimes can't be bothered to sing properly.
Like Johnny Rotten contemptuously spitting out Johnny B Goode, she shows an almost wilful indifference to intonation or melody when droning through Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin' and Tom Waits's (Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night, not helped by the fact that her behind-the-beat delivery often lagged a full two bars behind the band.
If her slight singing voice - all deliberate hesitation and stylised croaks - sometimes earns comparisons to Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, the general effect is of a Stars In Their Eyes Rickie Lee Jones.
Her quartet, featuring London pianist Jason Rebello, were effective accompanists, but most of the problems come from Peyroux's inability to project her intimate supperclub vibe to a 3,500-capacity venue, one whose audience stubbornly refused to obey the jazz convention of applauding after an instrumental solo.
This lacklustre show earns two stars if only for two immaculate moments - a goosebump-inducing rendition of Randy Newman's I Think It's Gonna Rain Today (her tribute to the people of New Orleans) and a spartan reading of Serge Gainsbourg's elegant waltz La Javanaise (sung in French and accompanied only by her bassist). But even that she managed to spoil by larkishly translating the lyrics into English mid-song.
It would be nice to report that Peyroux ended her set by bringing all those punk metaphors to life - trashing the drum kit and driving her guitar into a Marshall stack - but instead she droned through two dreary ballads as the audience of balding Radio 2 listeners, young lesbians, elderly gay men and lapsed jazz fans shuffled sleepily home. A pity.
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