PALOMA Faith has “tried to make this tour arty and theatrical”.

“So that means there isn’t as much talking,” she says after the fourth song, her cabaret cover of INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart.

The Hackney blues and soul diva had indeed not spoken up to this point, save for the first of three pre-recorded reflective arty and theatrical monologues that would pepper the show more in the manner of Kate Bush.

The truth is, however, that Paloma is a showgirl, like Kylie, although she restricts the choreography to herself, all elongated arms and side profiles for her full-length, Egyptian-influenced skirt and Danny La Rue-style feathered head gear.

“Then I get excited and I talk too much anyway,” she says, in the self-deprecating tone that marked out her Harrogate International Festival appearance two summers ago.

Her cookie chatter is her charm, and restricting it would be a mistake, even if her candour raises eyebrows twice, first when she reveals she is already “sick” of the songs off her first album, wondering how Tina Turner still sings her hits after so many years.

Thankfully Paloma is not so sick of them that she can resist resurrecting a fistful of her brighter, ballsier first batch of retro hits – Stone Cold Sober, Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful?, Upside Down and a walkabout in the standing audience for New York – in an interlude from performing last year’s overwrought, BRIT Award-nominated Fall To Grace in its entirety.

Her second revelation hints at a hardening attitude to match the safer, more calculated soul of last year's album: she wouldn't be staying behind to sign autographs, in order to protect her voice, she said. That was the truth, unwanted as it was; I preferred something more beautiful, as she reclined on the piano, B be, just her and that piano.

Fall To Grace-phase Paloma isn't as much fun as retro Paloma. Keep the theatrics, Paloma, especially when you play Dalby Forest on June 29, but leave the arty to Kate Bush.