No sundancing for Cassidy as Essex steals the show.

(From Newsletter)

Once in a Lifetime @ The Odyssey Arena

THE best show in town was the crowd. That was what roguish Romany rocker David Essex sang to us in Oh, What A Circus from Evita and so it turned out to be.

Essex was the substantial filling in a SeventiesO pop sandwich, with the Bay City Rollers on one side and the Partridge Family on the other, or at least their representatives in Ulster this week, in a tour which included the Osmonds elsewhere in the UK.

Les McKeown had brought his Bay City Rollers to open the gig, in a fun- kind of way.

Opening with Summer Love Sensation and closing with the anthemic Bye- Bye-Baby, he set the crowd up nicely for the hot evening. In the middle of the RollersO set was Shang-a-Lang, this time with a very rocky middle eight, by the time he had incorporated a vocal duet on Deep PurpleOs Black Night with his long-haired kilt-clad keyboards player Russell Keefe. It was well received by the mainly female audience and there was even a bit of tartan scarf-waving as well as a few pairs of tartan-trimmed trouser legs kicking.

Then the man whom most of the arena had come to see started his set. David Essex threw in a couple of tracks from his new album, but he knew how to play the crowd with songs he OOdid a little while agoOO like Hold me Close and Silver Dream Machine earning tumultuous applause. There was even a soulful rendering of WinterOs Tale on a midsummer night, but the stand-out number was the Evita masterpiece Oh What a Circus, with David reprising his role as Che Guevara. He thanked everyone for coming, said heOd been looking forward to his visit and ...