As if we needed a reminder of the value of the embattled Night & Day Café, television royalty visited on Monday night.
As the legendary Northern Quarter venue fights for survival against yet another noise complaint, Michael C. Hall - currently reprising his best-known role, as serial killer Dexter Morgan in Dexter: New Blood - brought his electro-rock three-piece, Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, to Manchester.
He’s no stranger to the city; he was frequently spotted in and around Didsbury in the summer of 2017, as he filmed the Harlan Coben series Safe for Netflix.
READ MORE: The Libertines to play 20th anniversary gig at Castlefield's Sounds of the City series
As fate would have it, he filmed numerous scenes inside Oldham Street's Night & Day itself back then.
It’s quickly apparent tonight, as he returns to the venue, that this Brooklyn-based band is no vanity project; after all, Hall has already proved his musical chops by taking on the lead role in David Bowie’s Lazarus musical, hand-picked by the man himself.
Ostensibly thematically intertwined with his final album, Blackstar , the play actually involved a run through Bowie’s back catalogue, so it’s no surprise to hear a few unheeded calls for ‘“Heroes”’ from the crowd tonight.
There’s certainly some of Blackstar inherent within the music, though; Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum’s sound is thickly atmospheric. They dip in and out of different genres; ‘Vicious’ is a glam-rock stomper, ‘Eat an Eraser’ is an exercise in pulsating electro-pop, and recent single ‘Tomorrow’s Screams’ is a spaced-out, slow-burning anthem.
Tying everything together is a sense of quiet drama, one that Hall sells impressively as a frontman; impassioned one minute and unsettlingly dead-eyed the next, he encompasses each track on its own terms.
That isn’t to say that the set isn’t trying, from time to time.
The band are here in support of Thanks for Coming , their debut album, but they’re not shy when it comes to reeling off as-yet-unreleased new material, whether it’s the noisy eighties-inflected electro of opener ‘Offering’, which sounds like a Gary Numan off-cut, or the swirling synths of ‘Jetpack’.
Hall might think that he’s approximating New Order with such commitment to electronic ambience, but perhaps the closest he comes to truly evoking a Manchester band is on closer ‘Come Talk to Me’; his falsetto recalls the Bee Gees, and not in a bad way, either.
Both of Hall’s bandmates in Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum are New York old hands, and yet tonight’s show still feels like a showcase for a fledgling band, one overflowing with ideas, but that occasionally doesn’t relay them as neatly as they might.
With Hall as frontman, though, the future’s bright - and crucially, that’s down to his voice and his stage presence, not his name.
