Perversely, in a set over an hour long, we don’t get his new single “Winners”, the standout track from last year’s The Golden Age, which sounds like the Minneapolitan Midget’s own “Kiss” (does it really go “So come on over in your Range Rover/And take it up the arse”?). But we do get “Never Get Ahead”, the one that sounds like “I Want You Back” by The Jackson Five, and a band who look like a gay Wizzard and all wear shell suits. That’s entertainment.The world, by now, is accustomed to rappers being white, and rappers being female. But both? The crowd at the hip-hop night of this year’s NME Carling Awards aren’t sure, and Princess Superstar, a dishwater blonde dominatrix with a mouth like an ashtray and a mind like a sewer, is clearly too much for some. When she strips down to next-to-nothing then zips herself up in Marianne Faithfull leathers, the girls think she’s a slut (doesn’t the Astoria have mirrors in the Ladies’?) The last laugh will be hers. Princess is on the brink of scoring a surprise hit with the hilarious and awesomely addictive “Bad Babysitter”, and next time around, they’ll be begging her to work overtime.As if to reinforce the point, she’s followed by Dilated Peoples, who could scarcely be more generic if they tried. Hip-hop has never been known for value for money when it comes to live shows.

Novelty southern fatboy Bubba Sparxxx does nothing to restore its VFM reputation, performing fewer songs than you’d expect for a quid on your average pub jukebox. After the first number, the pre-show Elvisburgers with cheese start playing havoc with his dicky colon, and he has to retire to take a dump.s.price independent.co.uk. Albert Herring/ Opera North The Grand Theatre

Do you know an Albert Herring? Even if you’re not personally acquainted, you’ll have seen an Albert somewhere; working hard at maintaining his independence in a world that moves slightly too fast. Phyllida Lloyd’s modern-dress production of Albert Herring for Opera North makes much of our imagined familiarity with this “simple” lad – that’s “simple” in the non pc sense, by the way – and his supporting cast of small-town, small-c conservative archetypes. Dress and period, she implies, are irrelevant to Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier’s 1947 Suffolk-set adaptation of de Maupassant’s story about the search for a May Queen in a town low on chastity. Snobbery, small-mindedness, delinquency, drunkenness and teenage pregnancies are as universal as the Loxford Festival Committee’s despair at what their – and our – world may be coming to.
Would the chemist in Loxford sell the morning-after pill? Not if Lady Billows (Josephine Barstow), Florence Pike (Susan Bickley), Miss Wordsworth (Elena Ferrari), Mr Gedge (Eric Roberts), Mr Upfold (John Graham-Hall), and Superintendent Budd (Jeremy White) had anything to say about it.

Were the members of the committee less well-characterised, this story might seem impossibly dated. As it stands, Albert Herring offers some of the most deftly drawn supporting characters in opera; each given admirable pathos and individuality by Lloyd, each cast with a singer of the appropriate age – though this can have its downside, vocally – and each entirely believable in this modern setting. For the lady of the manor, her companion, the botany teacher, the vicar, the mayor, and the head of the local constabulary, sexual activity among the youth of Loxford is something to be discouraged at all costs, hence the coronation of celibate, teetotal, “simple” Albert (Iain Paton) as May King – a plot device less improbable than the offstage Jungian journey he then makes. That the district midwife is admonished for touching infants born out of wedlock is the only line that jars, and the only line that hints at the depth of parochial dystopia.Lloyd’s production is scattered with smart visual jokes: Mrs Herring’s fruit and veg gleam waxily under the sickly glare of fluorescent strip-lighting, the committee meeting comes complete with a paparazzo slide-projection of bus-shelter groping and Snakebite-sodden snogs as each sunny-faced candidate is eliminated. The medium of prurience may have changed, it says, but the message hasn’t. But for all its wit, Act I of Lloyd’s Albert Herring is more Vicar of Dibley than How Do You Want Me? in its critique of Loxford Is it a light social comedy or a vicious satire? Neither.

Just as the fabric of decorum starts to fray, the opera’s focus switches to petulant oedipal rage. Albert – his tongue loosened by the fatal combination of booze and being forced to sit in a throne too artfully kitsch to be realistic – turns out to be less than simple after all He’s simply repressed By his mother. (Of course.)It says a lot for Lloyd’s feminist credentials that she and Ethna Robinson (Mrs Herring) manage to show some sympathy for Albert’s mother – who, if she really has been fetishising a perfectly capable boy as an idiot, is pretty unpleasant. Certainly Britten and Crozier neither care for Mrs Herring nor bother to explain how a none-too-bright grocery boy suddenly becomes the James Dean of East Suffolk. The leading role of this opera is the least well-drawn, which is a fatal flaw. For this reason, scenes two and three of Act II – by far the most static of the opera – are hard going indeed; an impression further amplified by Lloyd’s suddenly pensive staging and peculiar concentration on the orchestra. Clearly, if your band is on stage it’s rude to ignore them, but Lloyd demands a level of stagecraft beyond Opera North’s game instrumentalists.Should you go to see this Albert Herring? Yes Act I – and scene 1 of Act II – are a riot.