The Ambassador was an inspired choice of venue for this astonishing group. Performing in a defunct cinema, on a stage once concealed by a movie screen, Goldfrapp took us on a behind-the-scenes soundtrack tour of melodrama, sci-fi, disturbing film noir and schmaltzy musical, leading us to a place where European glamour and Hollywood images collide.
A starry backdrop twinkled to the overture of Miss World (an instrumental cousin of Lovely Head), before the enchanting Alison Goldfrapp joined her group for a wistful Paper Bag. Mysteriously attired as a 1940s army woman and accompanied by a violinist who, in Alpine-negotiating Lederhosen, resembled a refugee from the Sound of Music, Goldfrapp placed a conspicuous emphasis on spectacle.
So did their music. Amid a stage of quirky instruments - moogs jostled alongside synths, vocoders, samplers and an electric violin - the grandiose orchestrations of composer Will Gregory conjured up slow panning shots of Technicolor vistas. Beginning with an admitted debt to score-composer Ennio Morricone, Goldfrapp's musical terrain jump cut from genre to genre: spaghetti-western whistling one moment, spy-movie string washes the next. When theremin-imitating violin interrupted the airy cabaret decadence, it's as though a flying saucer has landed in the Weimar Republic.
Underpinned by superlative drums and a menacing moog, Human witnessed a beguilingly demented affair between the singer and her pincer-gripped microphone. Leaning into the languid torch song, Deer Stop, Alison Goldfrapp performed as though her life depended on it.
In the special-effect-strewn Lovely Head and the high-heel stamping Utopia, Goldfrapp's voice remained the star attraction.
"Cheers!" Goldfrapp clipped at her enrapt audience for the umpteenth time. She may not be have been adept at small talk, but with a voice alternately smooth and sultry, alarmingly operatic or drenched in alien effects, leading ladies don't come much better than this.
