But still, as she proudly reminds us, we’ve been watching a “real band” featuring “real people”, and to Rhianna Kenny, that’s what matters most.Summer in the city where the air is still, and several hundred men of a certain age (oh, women too, but mostly men) have turned the Borderline into a subterranean sauna. He had, of course, an unfair advantage: when Frame first emerged from Westwood, East Kilbride in a tassled suede jacket with a sunburst guitar tucked under his arm, he was only sixteen.Roddy’s eyes have the same steely blue glint as ever, although these days he’s bearing an increasing resemblance to Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man That voice, though, still resonates with romance. This acoustic show revisits his entire career, from ancient Postcard Records singles like “Mattress of Wire” to selections from his new solo album Surf, but only includes two songs (“Somewhere in My Heart” and “Oblivious”) you could call “hits”. I’d have killed for “Walk Out to Winter”, but you can’t have it all.He’s clearly having fun, although you wonder why Roddy, a shy man, and never a prolific performer, feels the need to do this.

Then again, if, “While you were gone I reached another town / They couldn’t help me but they showed me round” is a hell of a line to write at 16, “And if the prophets knocked my door with all that heaven held in store / I’d probably ask to see a sample” ain’t too shabby for a 38-year-old either.s.price independent.co.ukRhianna plays V2002 at Hylands Park, Chelmsford (020 7287 0932), today, and supports Beverley Knight on tour later in the year. Pedro Almod? is wearing a Ted Baker shirt and talking football: “It was like the national soccer team had won the World Cup.” Pedro Almod? as Jack the Lad? It’s a nice thought, but no – the Spanish film-maker is trying to give a sense of the hysteria back home that greeted his Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1999, for All About My Mother. “They decided many months before that the Oscar was for Spain. And I thought, if they don’t give it to me, I don’t know if I can return to my country.” He did return, of course, triumphant, after a year spent promoting his most successful film, both critically and commercially.

For a while he was kept busy by the adulation, offers from Hollywood and his work with a new generation of Spanish-speaking film-makers (he was a producer to Guillermo del Toro on The Devil’s Backbone). But one question nagged away at the most celebrated Spanish film-director since Bu?: what next?”I decided to make a very Spanish, very secret, very intimate film. I did the opposite that my audience expected of me.” Perhaps – but what we expect from Almod? has changed over the last decade. Until the mid-Nineties, he delivered freewheeling, amoral dramas and comedies, ranging from Matador to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Then, with 1995’s The Flower of My Secret, naughty Pedro seemed to grow up and calm down. His trademark bouffant remained, but as Almod? put on a little around the middle, so his output became weightier, too. The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh and All About My Mother, agreed everyone, heralded a newly mature approach.

The trans-sexuals, the junkies, the prostitutes were there, as ever, but Almod? wasn’t conducting them quite so provocatively.Talk To Her, at first glance, has a cast of characters you could take to your granny’s: Marco is a travel journalist; his new girlfriend, Lydia, is a female bull-fighter; Alicia is a ballerina lying in a coma; Benigno is Alicia’s male nurse. The two men become fast friends when, after a disastrous bull-fight, Lydia also ends up as a comatose patient at the clinic where Benigno works. The film then reveals that Benigno cares for his beautiful charge a little too ardently, and he becomes the creepiest challenge to audience sympathy that Almod? has yet created.Probably because two of its four central characters spend the best part of the film out for the count in hospital beds, Talk To Her is Almod?’s quietest film for a long time. It’s also, in narrative terms, far less complex than his previous two films. All of which enables him to concentrate more intensely on his main theme here: the contradictory and extreme nature of love.