"Is this a joke?" shouts a disgruntled heckler midway through this unsatisfying evening. "Get off." It doesn't seem to be a joke.
The Barbican's Only Connect series serves to offer a series of unusual live events. For the most part, it has been a runaway success. However, a collaboration between Teenage Fanclub - who may be better served by applying themselves to their moribund career rather than this messing about - and the virtually unknown American Jad Fair was always going to be tricky.
So it proved. The event may have been a world premiere of their Words of Wisdom and Hope album, but from the beginning there was no sense of spectacle, as unimaginative lighting half-highlighted six performers shuffling on stage as if fresh from an afternoon's plumbing.
Indeed, for all their instrument-swapping musicality, Teenage Fanclub have never been especially rewarding live and, as such, might make an ideal anonymous backing band. Yet all backing bands need someone to back.
Jad Fair, once of Half Japanese and clearly uncomfortable playing a venue larger than his living room, is neither performer nor singer. In fact, on a purely technical level, he cannot really sing, so he simply half talks, half mumbles. Occasionally, as on Behold the Miracle, he will do impersonations of farmyard animals.
Most frustrating of all, when the one chance for Teenage Fanclub's golden-voiced Norman Blake to sing three lines of Vampire's Claw arrives, he is inaudible. Too ill at ease to banter, Fair's sole concession to stagecraft is half-heartedly to pogo in faux-geek fashion and, as if to show he is above any form of popularism, he reads his lyrics from a lectern. He shouldn't worry: opportunity may choose not to knock at Jad Fair's door a second time.
The evening, like its parent album, is not wholly disastrous. There are sparks of nascent creativity: Fair is actually a fine, lovelorn lyricist. Indeed, if someone else were singing the songs and Teenage Fanclub ceased trying to emulate The Pastels' tinny playground amateurism, they might just be on to something. But if it is a joke, it is not an especially funny one.
