Knights in White Satin

March 2002

They certainly know how to build up an atmosphere at Cardiff's Glee Club. Five minutes before the show starts, there's a countdown - "Ladies and gentlemen, the show will be starting in X minutes" - accompanied by coloured spotlights and music which finally segues into the Pearl and Dean tune. Luckily, the compère, Simon Clayton, lives up to all the fanfare within a few moments of coming on stage.

The bastard son of Bob Hoskins and Fatima Whitbread (allegedly), he has the audience in the palm of his hand. His all-too-observant routines combine with a personal charisma to make him win everybody over almost at once, especially the rather excitable women sitting at the front.

The first act is Des Bishop, an abrasive New Yorker not in the least mellowed by spending the last few years in Ireland. His comparison of the two places shouldn't work, but it does, and he has a hilarious take on the idea of a Lord of the Dance/hip hop crossover.

There are flashes of a seriously well-educated man beneath the shouty young guy who tells us that his mother would kill him if she heard him talking like that, but he hides his status as one historically aware motherfucker with plenty of swearing and attacks on the British.

Talented as he is, Des must have been glad he didn't have to follow Mandy Knight, who takes the stage after him and then takes the audience's breath away. Her act is outrageous, but, more than that, it's deceptively tightly crafted so as to leave very little space to think during a barrage of jokes.

It's hard to know who to compare her to - Bjork? Eminem? - but no comparison can really sum her up. She's already won the Time Out award for best live comedy performance, and it's easy to see why.

She was always going to be hard to follow, and unfortunately the guy who does follow her doesn't make the best job of it. Dave Hadingham spends most of the gig chatting to the now-tanked-up-and-rather-scary women at the front, and I get the impression that he doesn't really want to be here. Perhaps he's had a bad day, and it's obvious that he's not on his usual form, but it's still difficult to understand why he's top of the bill, unless, as he says, it's because he arrived late.

The real star of the show is without question Mandy Knight, whose original take on life, love and, er , lining your vagina with egg boxes manages to blow most modern comics out of the water. Expect to see a lot more of her soon.