Chris Cornell’s all-seated acoustic show in the Olympia Theatre sold out months in advance. Cornell has played acoustic shows here before on the Songbook tour, which inspired him to write his latest album, Higher Truth.

Opening act, Fantastic Negrito, lives up to his name. The Oakland native introduces the opening tune, ‘Night Has Turned To Day’ as an autobiographical tune about waking up from a three week coma. Negrito strums his acoustic guitar with fingers twisted in the same car crash, as his pianist wingman keeps things turning over and provides smooth backing vocals. He is dressed in a shirt, tie and waistcoat with big hair and neatly trimmed beard, and is possessed of an incredible voice. It is expressive, and has a formidable range, like a mix of Jack White and Justin Timberlake. He is a natural performer, at ease with the audience and engaging in playful banter between songs.

Fantastic Negrito has been touring extensively with Cornell and knows how to get the audience onside. A soulful version of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’, popularised by Nirvana, gets a big response from the grunge loving audience. Negrito has wholly rewritten the song with a new bridge and outro. By the time his short set ends, Fantastic Negrito has established a rapport with everyone present and he earns a massive send-off.

Cornell enters a stage that is set up like a jamming room, on a massive rug with seven guitars scattered about between the amps and monitors. A high backed chair, a landline telephone on a table, and a turntable give it a homely look. This is an intimate gig for a man more used to playing this city’s arenas and the audience lap it up. He is accompanied by multi-instrumentalist, Brian Gibson, who earns his wage tonight as he flits between piano, mandolin and cello from one song to the next. Cornell gives a new interpretation of ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’, pacing the lip of the stage with a harmonica around his neck. ‘Fell On Black Days’ elicits the biggest reaction so far from the capacity crowd. This month is the 25th anniversary of the release of Temple Of The Dog and ‘Call Me A Dog’ is the first of three numbers from that album unleashed tonight.

Cornell has been through many incarnations in a career that now spans four decades. The setlist encompasses it all; the Soundgarden years, his time as part of the supergroup, Audioslave, and even his much derided, but commercially successful, collaboration with Timbaland. An extensive pedalboard has been sitting there unused for the whole set thus far and is called in to use for ‘Blow Up The Outside World’, with Cornell looping the guitar and playing percussively to create the outro.

For ‘Misery Chain’ from 12 Years A Slave, the record player comes into play as he takes up the mic from its stand and croons along to the record of the backing track. It’s strange to see the singer of ‘Jesus Christ Pose’ getting on like a lounge singer. He then manages to simultaneously insult and delight fans of both Metallica and U2 by playing ‘One’ by the thrash icons to the tune of ‘One’ by the local heroes. It’s a mashup that you've probably already seen on social media but, like with everything else, it is much more impressive in real life.

That twist on a cover is followed by another as he plays Johnny Cash's version of Soundgarden's ‘Rusty Cage’. Cash’s countrified arrangement has the crowd clapping along like they are at a hoedown. ‘Black Hole Sun’ is probably the best known Soundgarden number and it maintains its ability to impress even in an acoustic setting. The main set closes with another reinterpretation, this time of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ during which a woman in the front row openly weeps.

Cornell has already played for two hours and still we're calling for more as the set comes to a conclusion. You get your money's worth with this guy. After the briefest of sojourns, Cornell returns to the stage to sing ‘Scream’ along with the record player. There are plenty of shouted requests and someone asks for ‘Lost Cause’. “Do I have a song called Lost Cause?” He seems genuinely unsure so he makes one up. It has a key change and everything, and it sounds like a proper Chris Cornell tune.

The pedals are redeployed for ‘Higher Truth’ with Cornell down on his knees playing with the effects and building to a crescendo. He leaves us with the record player on a loop as we exit. The only nagging doubt about tonight is that the presence of the telephone remains unexplained.

Photos: AetherLight Photography

Gardiner Music’s new series of live music nights in Whelan’s continues with Waterford’s The Dead Heavys. Opening group The Mantells are from Manchester and are touring their new EP Can't Stop Won't Stop.

Drummer Lewis Moran sings harmonies with lead vocalist and guitarist Tom Barrow, while Dale Moran rocks a sexy looking 5-string Ibanez bass with gusto. He gets up on a nearby table during ‘Payday Playboys’ and the whole band deliver a cover of Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’ that gets the whole joint grooving. Barrow’s songs owe a debt to hometown heroes’ Oasis and The La’s and the tunes are short and to the point. They could do well here.

Gardiner Music’s Caoimhe Ní Riagain takes the stage to remind us that gig is in aid of SVP’s homelessness campaign, raising awareness and funds for the organisation, and that they are releasing a single called ‘Shelter’ by Katie Jenkinson for the cause.

The Dead Heavys are a six piece groove band with a dedicated percussionist driving the funky tunes. The Waterford sextet have three vocalists singing over some super groovy bass. The drums and percussion keep the vibe going between the rhythm-lead songs. They have a Spin Doctors vibe with Britpop-sized choruses. Their debut EP was produced by Jagz Kooner and there’s talk of an imminent album release to follow.

The keyboardist toys with atmospheric samples leading into current single ‘Lazarus’ before his piano takes over for the upbeat dance intro. The two guitarists harmonise like Crowded House’s Finn brothers on the next song and the trumpet comes out for the elegiac outro, an outro that quickly changes time and becomes a Mescalero’s version of ‘She's So Heavy.’ It's a brave move by any non-ska group to feature the trumpet so prominently but The Dead Heavys have understandable confidence in their abilities, individually and as a group. It's tricky enough to write a decent song, trickier again to make music that gets people dancing. The ability to do both simultaneously is a rare talent and should be treasured when it is found. Even through the thick funk rock fug, layered vocal lines reminiscent of José Gonzalez break through and elevate these songs from generic dance sludge. These guys are on another level.

In his book, This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music, Adam Smith-Houghton details the various hormones released by the hypothalamus when the brain processes sad music. Chief of these is prolactin. In a delicious pleasure/pain symmetry, prolactin is released both when the brain tries to cope with emotional trauma and also, tellingly, post-orgasm. Tonight at St Johns Church in Hackney, Scott Hutchinson and Frightened Rabbit are here to make sure we get a good dose of the emo boohoos, and A WHOLE FUCK TON OF PROLACTIN. The teenage boys crying along to The Midnight Organ Fight back in 2008 are now adult boys. They have beards. They have plaid. They want that prolactin.

A church is a fittingly sombre venue for a band so intent on laying their (albeit secular) feelings bare, and one feels Scott Hutchinson, self-excoriating misrerabilist extraordinaire might just feel as at home on a cross as he does on a stage. Frightened Rabbit walk on to a rapturous scream from the crowd, and begin a set of old songs and new. Hutchinson begins with a reflection on his audience “keeping up with the times”, looking forwards and looking backwards. After musing on the subject for a while, he settles on the latter: “Fuck what all your friends from Hoxton are listening to… come and see Frightened Rabbit in a church.”

The band begin with the barnstorming emo-opener from their latest album - ‘Get Out’, and after a characteristically polite “thank you, thanks, cheers”, launch into Pedestrian Verse’s ‘Holy’ and Midnight Organ Fight’s ‘Modern Leper’. At that point the people standing up in the pews next to the sign that says ‘no standing’, stick their fingers in the air. “I used to fucking hate Winter of mixed drinks” Hutchinson confesses of the band’s slightly overdubbed, much maligned, quite brilliant third album, before beginning the first of five songs from that album - ‘Living In Colour’, ‘Things’, ‘Footshooter’ and ‘Nothing Like You’. We then get the hey-nonny barn dance of ‘Old, Old Fashioned’ from Midnight Organ Fight, and a rendition of the astonishingly awkward ‘Keep yourself warm’ sung from the church pulpit.

It’s nice to see that the black dog of melancholy still stalks Scott Hutchinson despite his move to the sunny climes of LA, and that Frightened Rabbit continue to function on the ‘if it ain’t broke…’ mantra is probably the main reason they have kept their dogged and obsessively loyal fanbase over the last decade. The band return for an encore to end on ‘The Loneliness And The Scream’, a fist-pumping Winter of Mixed Drinks standout full of ‘woahs’ and seemingly constructed entirely in order to make a crowd sing along. Needless to say, it has the desired effect.