Sean Keane has a very real talent for performing. Witty and charming, he has a fine voice and a winning way with an audience. A pity then that, on the evidence of Sunday night's show, his choice of material is so poor. He is drawn towards the corny and the tedious, and the poverty of ideas made for a glum time.

His is the most insipid of genres - Irish and Western - where everything trundles along in a humdrum waltz time. He talked like one of the little people, and his songs were as hackneyed as a shillelagh. Stock phrases and progressions kill any pathos in music, and they abounded in The Man From Connemara and From Galway To Graceland. Rarely has a Richard Thompson song sounded so uninspired.

To compound matters, performance misjudgements abounded. Every guitar melody was plucked to death by an over-use of the plectrum that became extremely wearing, and the decision to drown his wonderful whistle playing and unaccompanied voice in a sea of echo was ill-founded in the extreme.

There is surely much more to Keane than this dead gig. This was the sound of a man without the courage of his conviction, sacrificing his talent for softly-spoken observations for chicken-in-a-basket nonsense. Better, surely, to be unnoticed than a singer with nothing to say.