Odd, rich and adventurous: Erykah Badu, at the Royal Festival Hall, reviewed

You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the good in everybody, even Hitler, because he was ‘a wonderful painter’, for example – than because she’s done something musical. Which is a shame because like her equally unproductive neo-soul contemporaries (Maxwell – five albums in 26 years; D’Angelo – three in 27 years), the music still sounds extraordinary.

A key influence on neo-soul was the hip-hop producer J Dilla, whose gift to music was to approach musical time in a new way: to remove notes, to make patterns repeat over much longer stretches than pop music would normally allow – over 32 bars rather than four – with the result that, to ears attuned to greater regularity, it sounded somehow wrong, as well as right. (Should you wish to know more, I commend to you a book from earlier this year, called Dilla Time, which explains it all in more detail than you perhaps need.)

That combination of the familiar and the unexpected flowed through Badu’s performance: chords that landed in odd places, unexpected melodic shifts, the way she let her voice slip into wordless expressions – sighs and shivers and shrugs – before pulling back to the lyrics and the melody. She communicated as much through sound as through word. But it was not spiky: it was lush, gorgeous and sensual, and her band were expert: ‘On and On’ was smoky and easeful, ‘Window Seat’ was like being wrapped in cashmere. Badu’s music can sound wine-bar bland if you’re not listening closely, but it’s actually so odd and rich and adventurous.

Her oddness, thankfully, didn’t extend to offering her thoughts on Pol Pot being a terrific Monopoly player, or Mussolini having a great recipe for cannelloni. One could perhaps have done without her between-song stylings on her personal drum machine, but I’ll stand up for anyone who comes onstage in an haute-couture outfit that looked, from where I was sitting, like she was wrapped in giant sponge fingers.

Were she more productive, and less eccentric, Badu would surely have become an A-list superstar, but still her crowd was devoted and ecstatic and unlike any I have seen before in its demographic diversity. It was like one of those concert scenes in a movie, where the crowd has to represent equally every ethnicity, sexual orientation and age, and anyone watching thinks, ‘That is not what concert crowds are like.’ But no, it turns out we can all live together in peace and harmony. Just don’t mention Hitler.

There was no such diversity at Porcupine Tree’s first British show for 12 years, promoting their reformation album Closure/Continuation. Here were white men of a certain age, in their tour T-shirts, many of them now lacking the hair that might once have fallen past their shoulders: I would guess 20 per cent of the audience accounted for 80 per cent of the hair. The hair would once have been long because Porcupine Tree are a prog rock band, even though the group’s leader, Steven Wilson, has long been desperate to escape that label, and has devoted his very successful solo career to trying to prove he’s not prog.

I must confess to a slight sense of dread: my feelings about prog are largely shaped by unfortunate early exposure to the Yes album Tales From Topographic Oceans, a four-song double album that has come to represent the self-important excesses of the genre. The discovery that it would be a three-hour show intensified the dread (all music writers secretly want most gigs to last no more than 45 minutes, contain only the very best songs, and be over by 9 p.m. We just rarely say so publicly).

Oh, me of little faith. They were fantastic. Wilson appears to love pretty much all music, which means his songwriting doesn’t stand still, and the opportunities for the band to solo endlessly are more limited than you might remember from your old ELP albums (while the drummer, Gavin Harrison, is proud of his instrumental virtuosity, both Wilson and keyboard player Richard Barbieri – once of Japan – downplay their own proficiency). Even when they did go long – 18 minutes of ‘Anesthetize’ – it didn’t seem long. That song, in fact, was staggering – hard and dynamic and propulsive, like a ride on a fast train.

Maybe I really am a prog fan. Just don’t make me listen to Tales From Topographic Oceans ever again.