Bringing the Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour to these shores, I finally get to see Weird Al Yankovic live. As the name might suggest, though, this is no ordinary tour. Cast aside are the parody songs he is most famous for - tonight, we are treated to the originals. I have long argued that these are the things that set Yankovic aside from his pale imitators. The man has an innate ear for what makes a Bob Dylan song a Bob Dylan song, or The Doors, or Rage Against The Machine, or so on. As such, he’s not limited to just replacing the words in existing ones - he can make his own, entirely believable, additions to the canon. Albuquerque takes on a shaggy dog style digression for nearly 20 minutes by my own sense of the passage of time. A bone is thrown in the encore with a lounge style medley of Amish Paradise, White And Nerdy, Yoda, and even some Boosh crimping too. The man’s a talent. For undiscernible reasons, Emo Phillips does a 30 minute opening set, and I would have paid full price for that alone. How wonderful to have had the chance to see him somehow still seem at his prime, with an audience that didn’t quite know what to expect, but loved what they got.