John Grant with the Royal Northern Sinfonia review – positively spine-tingling

“I wanted to change the world, but I could not even change my underwear,” sings John Grant at the piano, in a luxuriant baritone croon as thick and healthy as his beard. It’s hard to reconcile the guy who once struggled to so much as put on clean pants back in the bad old days – well-storied, not least through his own songs – with the one warmly and gracefully helming this complex, prestigious production – the penultimate date on a tour of packed concert halls, backed by an orchestra.

Classy is a tempting word to apply to many moments tonight. But then the Reykjavik-based American musician’s intelligent, witty and nakedly honest music – from the twisted torch songs of his debut solo album, Queen of Denmark, to its electronica-clad successor Pale Green Ghosts – was always that. Refracted through Royal Northern Sinfonia’s sonic prism of strings, brass and percussion, added to the guitars, drums and synthesisers of Grant’s five-piece band from Iceland, it becomes so much more: fabulous, fantastical, magnificent. Come the shuddering kraut disco of his second album’s title track, as served with an entree of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor, it’s positively spine-tingling.

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Between selections from both of Grant’s albums, plus Drug, by his old group the Czars’, we also get works-in-progress. These include a tribute to Grant’s movie idols (apt considering how cinematic several of this show’s orchestrated instrumental passages feel) imagining a humorously candid conversation with the actor Geraldine Page.

It could have been fun to hear a dancier moment from Pale Green Ghost raise the Usher Hall’s domed roof at the end, but Grant opts for a couple of elegant torch song, Fireflies and Caramel, that close to exuberant standing ovations. This show’s standout moment had already arrived, however, with the ironically narcissistic GMF (“greatest motherfucker”), during which Grant – usually self-deprecating, ever-mindful of those unchanged underwear days – couldn’t help but award himself a deservedly self-satisfied grin.