TIM DE LISLE

Sophie Ellis-Bextor The Forum, Bath

Touring until March 30 ★★★★★

Sophie Ellis-Bextor gets things done. When the pandemic came along, she started a podcast, published a memoir and performed live on Instagram every Friday evening with her Kitchen Disco, filmed on an iPhone by her husband Richard Jones. It’s lucky they have only five children.

Now they are putting on Kitchen Disco in person. The five boys who featured prominently in the online version have been left at home in London. Some parents manage to escape for date night; others set out on a national tour.

Jones is on the bass, leading a six-piece band. Ellis-Bextor (right), whose outfits lit up thousands of laptops in lockdown, is all dressed up with somewhere to go. She wears bright colours, like the Queen – first yellow, then orange and finally hot pink.

Unlike the Queen, she adds glittery make-up.

Singing, dancing, chatting and chuckling, she’s a very relatable domestic goddess. The stage has the air of a family home, full of toys, with a dressing-up drawer. The musicians are wearing animal heads and Ellis-Bextor opens the show sitting on a horse – not, alas, a real one. These props are not really required. Audiences are so hungry for live music at the moment that all you need is tunes. Ellis-Bextor has a few bangers of her own, from Groovejet to Murder On The Dancefloor, and it wouldn’t be a Kitchen Disco without a generous helping of covers. Her voice is more versatile than you might think. She manages to be a very decent Lionel Richie on All Night Long, and better than Madonna on Like A Prayer.

The band make a full, warm sound that adds an extra fizz.

Ellis-Bextor sings two songs with particular feeling, both far removed from the dancefloor.

One is There Are Worse Things I Could Do from Grease, dealing eloquently with what is now called slut-shaming.

The other is My Favourite Things from The Sound Of Music, which she does as an encore, from the circle, unaccompanied – except by a choir of hundreds of women. It makes a lovely end to a very likeable show.