Patrick Wolf

Somehow, while nobody was looking, Patrick Wolf has become a singular pop star. In his dreams, this gangly 24-year-old is a dazzling, chart-friendly hybrid of Jacques Brel and Marc Bolan. At tonight's homecoming Christmas show, though, he more strikingly resembles a winningly slapstick encounter between Morrissey and Timmy Mallett.

The precocious Wolf has spent the year touring the globe in support of his idiosyncratic, modern-glam third album, The Magic Position. However, it appears middle America has inexplicably failed to open its wallets to a beanpole auteur who will turn up, as he does tonight, in breeches, a golden cape and a vivid ruff, topped off with a stuffed blackbird perched on top of his head.

Wolf himself is no great respecter of venerable reputations. "Ike Turner has just died," he tells a venue heaving with dolled-up teenage disciples. "Thank God, the violent bastard! Nobody does that to our Tina!" Flouncing around stage with a Bambi-like grace, he also administers cunning tongue-lashings to Pete Doherty and Simon Amstell with a coy vituperation that Russell Brand might envy.

Musically, Wolf specialises in brooding, eclectic art-pop that turns romantic outsider-angst into showy flamboyance. This fetching sense of melodrama is not exploited to the full in his dreary opening solo set, which never really gets going; tonight's fun begins when Wolf returns, a vision in pink boa and matching hair weave, accompanied by his string-heavy band. Skipping between piano and violin, Wolf is inventive and musically competent, but the evening is carried by his energy, chutzpah and eccentric stagecraft. For Get Lost he rolls around the stage like a hyperactive toddler. New track The Lighthouse sees him reinvent the dying-fly dance first performed by Chris Tarrant on Tiswas in the early 1970s, before ending with a striptease on top of a speaker stack.

Hurling himself into the throng at regular intervals, a grinning Wolf delivers his encore wearing a blond fright wig and polka-dot hat, in which he strongly resembles an indie-rock Widow Twankey. After camping through his signature tune, The Magic Position, he takes his leave in a blizzard of fake snow and goes flying over a monitor. You won't find a better Christmas panto this side of Watford.

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