Music review: Charlotte Church's Late Night Pop Dungeon

It wasn't terribly late at night and the venue in Oran Mor, though subterranean, is no dungeon, but Charlotte Church was asking her Friday night audience to go with her on this concept. Having made her money as the teenage Voice of an Angel, Church has spent recent years pleasing herself with experimental pop recordings and is now fronting this superficially silly covers band, who trooped on stage adorned in sparkly wigs, hot pants and headdresses and proceeded to unleash a fearsome 90-minute live mixtape of surefire party-starters by the likes of Prince, Missy Elliott and'¦Black Sabbath.

Charlotte Church’s Late Night Pop Dungeon ****

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Half the fun was in playing spot the tune, many of which were audaciously woven into unexpected medleys. Nelly’s Hot In Here was partnered with Talking Heads’ Burning Down the House, Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere decorated by paper streamers and a coda of The Dream Academy’s Life in a Northern Town and gratifyingly heavy versions of Destiny’s Child and Justin Timberlake pop R&B favourites appended with the urgent guitar riff from Radiohead’s Paranoid Android.

Quite apart from displaying impeccable taste in introducing Funkadelic and Can numbers to the eclectic mix, Church and her band, including three game backing singers, had the impressive technical chops required to playfully yet skilfully inhabit multiple musical realms from club classics to freakout funk to prog rock – which is about as close to categorizing her demented operatic rendition of the ET theme tune as it may be possible to get.