Vikki Stone & The Flashbacks: Big Neon Letters

Frank Black was once told by an elderly member of an orchestra he was working with: “Boy, you sure can holler.” Vikki Stone sure can belt out a tune too, as well as pound her keyboard to within an inch of its life.

Neither Black nor Stone are shy retiring pixies, then, but her gigantic task is to apply her drama-school skills to comedy. Certainly she can't yet rely on her banter between her songs as it has the tonal register of a TV presenter trying to be be funny.

Even the lines that stick out, such as her take on Twitter ("For every Arab Spring there's a Justin Bieber video") suffer from a delivery clear but without much comic timbre. Meanwhile, though Stone's three-piece outfit master tight musical arrangements, such a professional sound doesn't always suit comedy. Tim Minchin and Flight of the Conchords are rare exceptions, proving how tricksy it all is.

Bossy and brassy Stone belts out some quite one-dimensional ditties, one about her cat who isn't active enough to be a YouTube smash, another about how she fancies Phillip Schofield. She has more luck later on with pastiches of Bonnie Tyler's 'Holding Out For A Hero' and a series of Abba classics. Without an original tune to worry about Stone seems to have thought harder about content, even if she sticks to the her favoured ground of smut, which is fine if and when it works.