2006-05-09 - 10:07 a.m.

On Sunday I went to see this:

If you think it can't have been as weird as it sounds, you are wrong. It was almost exactly as weird as it sounds. The venue - the converted public toilet in which Wilfred Bramble, the senior star of TV's Steptoe and Son was once arrested for cottaging - was packed.

The opening act was Hypnotique, a brooding cabaret soloist who played 'uplifting and soothing music for the impending apocolypse'. People laughed. With her a bit, but I suspect mostly at her. Partly because the sound of the theremin is intrinsically funny and partly because of basically everything she was doing, saying and singing.

After the interval came Masami Takeuchi. Oh, just google him for goodness' sake, I can't be arsed faffing with typing a h bloody ref= all the time and wiping your cyber-arses for you.

As you will see, he looked like an anonymous Japanese businessman, but too nice to be the type to invest in schoolgirls' underwear and too happy to drive into the sea and drown, like in the Pixies song. Popular culture teaches us that all Japanese businessmen fall into one of these categories, or possibly both, but evidently it's not true. A third group plays the theremin.

Masami was well-received. Slightly too-well-received by some ironic wankers who were clearly approaching the whole evening of people in evening-wear teasing ghostly sounds out of bizarre electronic instruments as a bit of a conceptual joke. For some reason. This is what happens when you only charge �6 a ticket.

Masami was joined on stage by his wife for my favourite bit of the evening. If you've never heard a theremin duet...hmm, the 'if' in that unfinished sentence was probably redundant. Anyway, she played the odd bum note, which is (unintentionally) funnier on a theremin than it would be on the viola. But once she found her range the harmonies and visual spectacle provided by a married couple synchronising arm movements on a tiny stage was genuinely moving. They did El Condor Pasa and...oh, my moist eyes. It must be the smoke in here.

Finally, the couple were joined on stage by a bunch of Masami's students. As you may be able to see in the picture, they played theremins disguised as Russian dolls, the pitch of which they monitored through stethoscopes plumped into the back of the dolls. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it went a bit wobbly. A dozen or so simulataneous theremins (and a keyboard accompaniment) is pretty ambitious. And by the sound of it, you can't reliably hit an opening note on the theremin - you have to kind of swoop up until you hit it, and then go into the number. This meant that the start of every song sounded like the opening moments of a tiny grand prix.

Masami was keen on the Russian theme, playing various folk songs, and even the theme from From Russia with Love. But sadly not Rasputin by Boney M.

If you're still wondering what's weird about a dozen Japanese people sitting on a small stage in the converted toilet in which Wilfred Bramble from Steptoe and Son was once arrested for cottaging and playing folk songs on converted Russian dolls with stethoscopes plumbed into the back of them...you need to get out less.

Profilage - Previosity - Nextitude