A heartfelt tale of lost love and despair.

Noah and the Whale at The Sage Gateshead WATCHING someone make an entire room full of people fall in love with them is a truly surreal experience.

Especially when it is done with the aid of songs about infanticide and one-night stands - not exactly your typical turn-on subjects.

But then the beauty and appeal of Sunday's Noah and the Whale gig, and in particular the band's lead singer Charlie Fink, lay in the refreshingly stark honesty that they brought to their music - an honesty that made everyone's hearts instantly go out to the heartbroken lead singer. The performance could only be described as a night of pure melancholy heartbreak, where it felt like you were listening to the deepest, darkest and inner-most thoughts of someone's diary.

For anyone who has ever found and then lost love, many of Fink and Co's words - including a description of how love makes you feel like "a fox trapped in the headlights" will have seemed particularly poignant.

It was so moving you could even forgive the fact that Fink dances like an arthritic dinosaur and that his bassist is quite possibly the sweatiest man in England (he had to towel-dry his hair after just the first song).

Despite this, though, it's fairly safe to say that a heartfelt tale of lost love and despair was successfully woven and I for one was almost brought to tears.

Christine Fleming