Music: Songs for a nobody

THE LOST LAST SONGS OF OPAL LORBIN PURCELL ROOMS RFH LONDON

YOU MEAN you have never heard of Opal Lorbin? Same here. It could be because the supposed songwriting prodigy, said to have flowered at the death of the Sixties never existed.

He was invented for this one-off performance by Jonathan Stone - a former trainee pig farmer turned artistic chameleon.

Stone's collaborators were some of rock's most respected musicians "and Lorbin's biggest fans", according to the programme.

They included David Catlin Birth (Robbie Williams's bassist) and Amanda Kramer from the divinely melodious 10,000 Maniacs - her mouth set in a pinched and plummy smile.

Stone orchestrated the concert in a deadpan manner, introducing songs by recounting major events in the bogus master's life.

Stone charted Lorbin's progress from his birth in Upper Silesia to his vigil in a hut in Scotland, where he was meant to have written his finest songs inspired by drugs and Ambrosia rice pudding.

Only once in his role as master of ceremonies did Stone break into a smile. This was after he claimed that Lorbin had been inspired by the rhythm of a Carpathianfolk dance. Laughter.

He looked at the stage and blurted: "It's true."

When singing, Stone found a force which belied his spare frame, and projected mock menace. At first he suggested a peeved Estonian crooner knocked out in the warm-up heats of the Eurovision Song Contest. By the third song Stone had taken on a sullen Nick Cave aura. Towards the end he called to mind Radovan Karadzic pointing and raving.

Throughout, the lyrics were virtually incomprehensible: "Vorsprung technik hup hup hup" was about as lucid as it got.

Some of the audience laughed; others stared with what looked like touched admiration as if they were witnessing Dylan; and some couples cuddled up in reaction to the quieter songs.

The illusion of serious artistic endeavour was helped by the musicians' virtuosity. They gave the impression they could play anything from garage to Grieg. They tended to settle for foot-tapping melody, even performing the Lorbin version of "Get It On". Every now and then, to keep us alert and reflect Lorbin's episodes of derangement, So Blime would judder and slew into bouts of outrageous cacophony.

Even so, as a whole the hoax did not stand out as extraordinary in the current pre-millennium craze, perhaps because it resembled David Bowie's recent phoney artist scam too strongly.

At times it also seemed rather pointless. But partly it served as an excuse for a liberating display of surrealism in a solemn environment and it was also an attempt to expose our pretensions.

And when it was all over the audience responded with remarkably earnest applause.