"I was gonna strip for all the girls tonight but they said I'd get locked up. You can have a little peep though," says Cee-Lo, frontman of Gnarls Barkley, just before a paper missile lands on stage and puts paid to his moment of erotic glory. The Atlanta singer with the booming voice reads aloud a request to cover Summer Holiday - it seems the ghost of Cliff Richard has stepped in to stop the raunch. Good: it would have felt odd to watch a Chippendales routine from a man dressed as an 11-year-old.
Tonight's costumes are inspired by the film Rock School (previous Gnarls Barkley shows have seen the band dressed as characters from Star Wars and The Big Lebowski). Dressed in shorts and knee-socks, with his tumescent tummy bursting out of his blazer, Cee-Lo looks like a bald, black Billy Bunter. His string section look particularly fine, St Trinian's-style, even managing to perform perfectly synchronised dance routines from their seats, shimmying with their bows. Danger Mouse, seated at the back where he gives Doctor Who's sound effects team a run for their money with his big red keyboard, is also in uniform, but with his 'fro and his shades he is far too cool for school.
Cee-Lo's voice is scratched and enormous as he delivers most of the pair's debut album St Elsewhere; he calls us "motherfuckers" at every opportunity and says tonight is all about love, all about making a connection. "I'm not happy if you're not happy," he pleads, knowingly, since we are clearly ecstatic. As you might expect from a band who had their hit deleted after announcing that nine weeks at the top of the charts was quite enough thank you very much, everything is fast and everything is fun, yet not everything is funny. The songs touch on suicide and pain, yet with their pulsating bass lines, it's a gothic kind of funk, and by the time they play Crazy, that uplifting anthem about a man going insane, things feel truly spiritual. If, as the writer Chuck Palahniuk has said, we go to church not to be good but to tell stories of how bad we are, Gnarls Barkley are the perfect preachers.
· At Creamfields festival, Cheshire, on August 26. Box office: 0870 264 3333.
