Arts Reviews

She writhes like electricity; her female dancers jiggle around in Abraham Lincoln costumes with protruding red phalluses; her party pieces include light bondage and vomiting blood over the audience.

Why oh why could the wonderful electro-vixen Peaches not have competed in the Rose of Tralee? This level of gleeful subversion, so early in the running order, almost threatens to topple the rest of the day.

The legendarily provocative New York Dolls could have spent their set paying tribute to former members who succumbed, inevitably, to punk, but, with their cute leather jackets, sweetie-pie profanities and adorably age-ravaged faces, the surviving Dolls look and sound rather comforting.

So it falls to The White Stripes, Detroit's pummelling blues-rock duo, to take the pastoral idyll of Marlay Park and rip it to shreds. Jimi Hendrix, you may recall, once stood next to the mountain and chopped it down with the edge of his hand. Tonight Jack White, an equally astounding guitarist, could level it with his index finger.

Surrounded by dental-surgery lamps, White extracts a molar-rattling riff from Black Math, while his ex-wife (or sister - I forget which) dips the tempo of her beats for his screeching solo. What strikes you most is not how uncomplicated Meg White's thunderous drumming remains, nor that Jack now delivers his lyrics with the whinnying trill of a medicine-show huckster, but that the pair have an almost empathic communication, rendering each song as taut or loose as they decide.

Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground, Little Bird, Hotel Yorba, Ball And Biscuit and Fell In Love With A Girl pound down with brutal and thrilling force. Between each shelling one wonders how many times the Whites can find new escape routes from the self-imposed trap of their red-and-white/drums-and-guitar- only aesthetic. But as they walk off stage, hand in hand - "My sister thanks you," says Jack, "and I thank you" - with Seven Nation Army still ringing in our ears, The White Stripes are unbeatable.- Peter Crawley

Green Day

The Ambassador, Dublin

Poor Green Day. Culturally closer to Maximum Rocknroll magazine than to Smash Hits, musically closer to Buzzcocks than Busted, they're a skin-tight punk band still seen by many as a mainstream pop band. Despite their credible California past (their first albums were released by the hip Lookout label) they're doomed to be forever seen as the godfathers of Blink 182, Sum 41 and all the other frat-boy parties masquerading as punk-pop groups.

Don't feel too sorry for them, though. They've sold out the cavernous Ambassador tonight, and fans were queuing outside the venue at 11 o'clock this morning for the strange privilege of being first in to a non-seated show (the kindly band bought pizza for the longest queuers). And they don't seem to care about exuding studied cool - if they did, would they be joined by a trumpeter in a pink bunny suit for a rousing version of Shout? Or perform a hard-core Danny Boy? Or have a drummer called Tre Cool? The fans don't care about that anyway. The atmosphere is fuggily electric as the surprisingly mixed crowd, which ranges from kids to fortysomethings, sings along perfectly to every song.

In fact, they do more than sing. At one stage the band ask the crowd if anyone knows how to play Knowledge. The stage is stormed by would-be musos, and a few minutes later we're watching Green Day Jr as frontman Billy-Joe Armstrong sings along to the accompaniment of the impressively skilful fans, who all stage-dive into the crowd to huge cheers. Later he leads a mass singalong of Minority, before ending the night with a full-on hands-in-the-air cover of Queen's We Are The Champions. Yes, it's pantomime, but it's pantomime with good humour and, more importantly, great songs, and it's hard to resist.- Anna Carey

O'Toole, RTÉCO/Brophy

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Waldteufel - España Waltz. Rodrigo - Concierto De Aranjuez. Granados - Goyescas Intermezzo. Falla - Three-Cornered Hat Suite No 1

This was the second Spanish-flavoured concert in the current Tuesday- lunchtime orchestral series. Unlike the earlier one, with music by Russian and French composers, the programme was dominated by Spanish composers associated with the development of a national school of composition. Such music needs to be performed with plenty of character.

In Rodrigo's Concierto De Aranjuez the playing of the soloist, Michael O'Toole, was fluent, shapely and always apt. So it was frustrating that this evocative music was distorted by gross amplification of the guitar. Rodrigo's orchestration is precisely calculated to address the challenges of balance presented by the combination of orchestra and guitar. His efforts counted for nothing.

The performance was a prime specimen of a worrying tendency in concert-giving: live music-making is being reshaped in order to imitate falsities perpetrated in the recording studio.

As usual, David Brophy conducted as one who knows exactly how he wants the music to go. Everything was in the right place and there was plenty of local energy. So it was a pity that all these benefits did not produce more long-term drive and more of the national colour that is the lifeblood of music such as Falla's Suite No 1 from The Three- Cornered Hat.

Nevertheless, this was a creditable concert. Although the heavily accented rhythmic style tended to blur stylistic distinctions, it was engaging to hear Waldteufel's hilarious España Waltz (based on Chabrier's piece of that name) played with such unashamed panache. And subtle music-making was well represented in a thoughtful and delicate performance of the intermezzo from Granados's Goyescas.- Martin Adams

Series concludes next Tuesday at 1.05 p.m., with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra conducted by Proinnsías Ó Duinn