When John Holt was at his early-70s peak and based in London, his albums were invariably sweetened with orchestral arrangements. So teaming one of reggae's golden voices with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra was not such an incongruous notion. More than a quarter of a century later, traditional reggae has long been usurped by its truculent step-children, ragga and rap. Yet there is always hope for music of life-enhancing optimism and at the Hammersmith Apollo even the standing areas were full.
As soon as Holt emerges, crooning Lobo's I'd Love You to Want Me in his delicious tenor, with the 20-piece orchestra behind him at full-pelt and Lloyd Parkes's We The People Band providing rhythmic foil, you wonder what that muffled, rumbling sound is. It is the well-behaved, seated crowd, hands aloft, swaying from left to right and back again, and singing along with unbridled gusto.
Tiny, bushy-bearded John Holt - 53, dressed in formal eveningwear, greying dreadlocks down to his buttocks - grins like a fool. As well he might. "Everyone feeling irie?" he asks. Indeed, everyone is and matrons scream as if it were 1974 and Holt was having his only hit with Kris Kristofferson's Help Me Make it Through the Night. When he performs the song, it might as well be. Holt prowls the stage with his microphone, pointing, smiling and letting the crowd sing the choruses.
The orchestra seem to have a ball, adding a sheen of lushness to Holt's already rich tones, while Parkes's team, who had already played their own set and backed Freddie McGregor, carried on insouciantly, never missing a beat.
For the final half hour, Holt kept clear of the orchestra, reducing them to a spectating role. This worked fine when reclaiming Holt's own The Tide is High from the anaemic hands of Blondie and Wear you to the Ball, as covered by UB40, but the endless re-checking of whether we remained "irie" and a succession of a cappella fragments hardly helped correct the impression of a man who had lost concentration, run out of ideas and squandered precious orchestral resources.
