ROCK / Still quavery after all these years

Greater love has no child than that he shall sit through Crosby, Stills & Nash with his parents. The brave front put up by the trio of seven-to-nine-year- olds sitting in a line at the Royal Albert Hall slips only once. At the climax of an especially excruciating Stephen Stills guitar solo, they put their hands over their ears.

Judging by the degree of fervour with which the nominally more adult sections of the crowd greet David Crosby, you'd think he'd just invented ice cream or found a cure for the common cold, not spent half his life as a drug-addled potato-head. Some people jump up shouting, 'It's great to have you back, David,' and shake their fists in jubilation. Others cling to copies of his door-stopping autobiography, Long Time Gone. No wonder he's beaming like a walrus who's woken up in a fish factory.

This is an acoustic evening, which means no one could be bothered to hire a drummer, but never mind. As their long-ago pedigrees suggest (the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Hollies respectively), harmony was always CSN's strength, and their three-part interactions on old chestnuts like 'Wooden Ships' - Crosby quavery, Stills gruff and Nash prim - have survived miraculously intact. Unfortunately, so have their solo slots. 'I don't know how to say this without sounding mushy,' says Crosby, introducing Nash, 'but this guy is the best friend any man could ever have.' Nash goes on to sing about a nightmare he had when emerging from the anaesthetic after a recent knee operation. 'Why does that always work?' a bemused Stills asks himself, after a piece of quasi-Hungarian gypsy fretcraft has bought the crowd to its feet. I don't know, Stephen, I just don't know.

The man who's currently the biggest pop star in Britain dances like Muffin the Mule. This is not in itself a bad thing. Mr C of The Shamen - slight but mightily cod-pieced, short blond hair plastered on his head, waggling his finger at the nation's youth and counselling 'E's are good' on national television - has made an entertainingly unapologetic folk devil these past few weeks.

For all the jokey exploitativeness of 'Ebeneezer Goode', The Shamen take their psychedelia seriously; advocating natural hallucinogenic mushrooms as the best way to open your mind ready for the coming apocalypse and the tricky transition to hyper-space.

The means they choose to further their quest is the white heat of audio-visual technology. (This group are not afraid of contradiction: 'E's are not good,' founder Colin Angus said recently, 'I hope people get the message'.) They've certainly left their roots as a dull Sixties-influenced guitar band a long way behind. Their densely percussive proselytising is enlivened by Mr C's large personality and comedy Cockney patois, Jhelisa's big soul vocals and the odd canny pop hook such as the chorus to 'Love Sex Intelligence'. The back-projections are good too: a diverting blend of computer graphics, time-lapse plant growth and owls and parrots borrowed from BBC nature programmes. There is one excellent sequence in which a brain turns to bracken - exactly what seems to have happened to the person waving his arms next to me.

'I've got seven hours baby, so what do you want to do?' Prince asks on one of the many genitocentric aerobic workouts on his new album, entitled simply (Paisley Park). Oh, anything really; get a video out, pop down to the off-licence and buy a bottle of cider. Just don't make me listen to your new album again. In the context of his fine recent live shows, the new stuff sounded promising, but here the dainty Minnesotan genius shows himself to be suffering from a surfeit of control. There has always been a certain amount of ballast on Prince's long-playing funky motherships, but this one is crammed to the gunnels with it, and there is no one in his inner circle with the guts to tell him to get a grip.

It's supposed to be a 'rock soap opera' about a pop star and a Middle Eastern princess, which might have been quite funny, but the only concession to storylining is a few embarrassing cameo utterances from Kirstie Alley pretending to be a journalist. What you get is an hour and a quarter of well-played but largely characterless state-of-the-art auto-slink. In his keenness, and ability, to show himself both Jack and master of all dance styles, Prince has lost track of what it was that made him special. The unseemly determination of his latest single to underline the fact that his name is Prince and he is funky seems to be more for his own benefit than anybody else's.

(Photograph omitted)