The South Bank's series of Peel Sessions Live continues to bring together unlikely musical bedfellows - such as skiffle king Lonnie Donegan and Half Man Half Biscuit - in an even more unlikely venue. Peel also chose this session to be part of the South Bank's Living Legends series, offering "the names that for decades inflamed the status quo and recharged rock and blues, cubaba and soul, pop and electronica, just as they threatened to fall flat".
That's just the sort of pap Wirral boys Half Man Half Biscuit would stick a Doc Marten into. They were introduced by Peel as "one of our national treasures", but they've never been bothered about being curated by the establishment. And the fact that the QEH, with its formality and lights-down silences, makes so many pop gigs uncomfortable helped make their absurd observations even more bizarre.
Moshing was replaced with toe-tapping as they shambled through a set that waged a gentle war against all that is wanky - such as the "laughable respect given to feedback" in Look Dad No Tunes. It was hard to escape their wry observations on suburban bores, Met bar coke heads and B-list celebrities without binning your mobile and burning your Filofax.
Donegan was our first real pop star - a sort of British Elvis. Skiffle, with its washboards and tea-chest bass, was a bridge between traditional jazz and rock'n'roll. And Donegan, as its pioneer, had 30 songs in the UK top 30 between 1955 and 1962 before the Beatles swept it away.
Donegan still plays and sings with a twitching, impish energy, orchestrating the band with little flicks of the hand and the odd throw-out leg. He rages through his repertoire of American folk and blues tunes such as Rock Island Line and Brother Moses Smote the Water with an impressive vocal range - everything from Vic Reeves' "in the club style" to a rich, bluesy bass. The roots of skiffle's rough ingenuity were still there, but this was a richer sounding electric band (two guitars, banjo, saxophone, harmonica and percussion), complete with fully harmonised vocal breaks.
Perhaps Donegan, now 68, was eager to prove he could still throw himself into the job, but the slick up-tempo race to the finish would have been better balanced with more of the darker, slow blues. But multiple encores and a standing ovation proved that, while his style isn't exactly the punk it used to be, it can withstand a little revival as a glimpse of the roots of pop.
