I should have known it, of course. I should have guessed when I subscribed to Europop, the Divine Comedy internet mailing list, what I was letting myself in for. Dozens of e-mails dropped into my mailbox each day, and a few of them even related to Neil Hannon and his Divine Comedy, rather than childish spats about the relative merits of support bands and relative moistness of list-member knickers.

But I had to go see the Divine Comedy live, having missed his 'now legendary' gigs... so we took up our seats in the balcony at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. Actually getting to the balcony was an effort in itself. The signposting is not great in the RFH and after a few flights of stairs we had to stop at a bar for a glass of Duff beer and some oxygen. A few darkly dressed bright young things wafted past. We decided to take our seats.

The first half of the show was pretty rip-roaring and enjoyable stuff. They cantered through the highlights of Promenade, or 'The Michael Nyman Album' as I call it, and I was pretty pleased by interval time.

We spent the interval sitting in our seats, yawning. Neil must have been busy though. He returned to the stage sans beard and apparently having sung a few choruses of 'A Drinking Song'. The tipsiness of the second half left me feeling a bit miffed. He mixed up lines in 'If...', and not in the knowing way BabyBird does when he's had a few ales... (i.e. most of the time, as far as I can tell). It dawned on me that, far from telling me anything new about the man and his music, this was less exciting than sitting at home, with a Duff beer and fattening snack food, listening to the CD.

The sound was poor, which didn't help. I can't help being picky about sound, I'm a sound engineer. The vocals were too loud and too distorted. The drumkit also too loud. I wanted to hear the orchestra more clearly. I wanted to get them in a studio, mic everything up and rebalance the whole damn show.

A young woman presented Neil with a single rose, and he vanished into the audience; the orchestra vamped and us folk in the balcony were left with nothing much to do for ten minutes. We couldn't see where he'd gone or what he was up to. I looked at my watch and wondered how long he'd be AWOL.

For the encore, all the kids piled down the front, swaying appropraitely for 'A Drinking Song', a perfect encore song and one that benefits from the singer's inebriation. I wish he'd left it at that, though. The kids on the balcony also piled down to the front, so our view was totally blocked. I could feel the balcony shake slightly, and wondered if the building could cope with this. Fortunately there is nothing more un-coordinated than a hundred white, middle class teenagers dancing, so there was no chance of serious structural damage.

His final encore, ELO's 'Mr Blue Sky' fell apart totally. Neil asked the NME, Melody Maker, VOX etc. to pretend it didn't happen. Sorry mate, you didn't ask meeeeee. We wondered aloud how many of the kids thought it was a Neil Hannon song anyway.

We strolled off into the night, a little sad. I realised that I like Neil Hannon's music, I admire it, but he doesn't really get me there. I don't adore his songs. I had also over-estimated the average age of his fan-base by about twenty years. But then I am Becoming More Like Homer.