He's no longer in that league, but in an early-evening slot he can still get the green, white and orange flags waving. The mind of Father Jack in the body of Wayne Slob, he dribbles his way through a set that leaves you wondering whether he is the provenance of the expression "the luck of the Irish". As an alcoholic, he's lucky to make his living in the artificial- stimulant-friendly sphere of music; as an alcoholic musician, he's lucky to be working in the artificial-stimulant-friendly sphere of Irish folk- rock knees-ups; and as an alcoholic Irish folk-rock musician, he's lucky to have as focused and fiery a band as the Popes to prop him up.Fleadh highlights came from the not-at-all Irish Dr John (see Records, page 10), and the not-much-more Irish Billy Bragg. The latter's set was historic, and not just because it consisted entirely of songs the crowd had never heard before, and mini-lectures to explain the context in which these songs were written - hardly the best tactic for whipping up a festival crowd. No, this was a momentous 40 minutes because these were no ordinary Bragg songs: he'd got in Woody Guthrie to write the words for him.To be more accurate, Guthrie's daughter, Nora, unearthed sheaves of the legendary folk singer's lyrics, for which no music was ever written down or recorded, and gave Bragg the job of completing them It was a controversial choice. Bob Dylan and Guthrie's son, Arlo, were more obvious candidates, but once you've heard Bragg singing these epistles from the 1940s and 1950s, you won't be able to imagine the lyrics any other way. They're wonderful, and fit the music so snugly that if Bragg were not the essence of decent blokehood, you'd suspect the project to be a hoax.

It never sounds as if he has imposed his identity on the words. It sounds, rather, like he has stared so hard at the manuscripts that he has discerned Guthrie's musical notation engrained in invisible ink He doesn't sing the songs in an Essex accent, either. Anyone who wasn't at the Fleadh can hear them on Mermaid Avenue (EastWest), released next week.Boy George is 37 today, which makes his sobriquet more inappropriate than ever - and it was never very appropriate. But his one-off show at the Albert Hall on Tuesday proved that age has not withered him nor dimmed his star quality. All the same, the evening was a puzzling jumble of obscure songs, new songs, cover versions and even two songs sung by a backing vocalist, while George was offstage "changing into something even more ridiculous". Redemption came in the form of Jon Moss and Mikey Craig, drummer and bassist of Culture Club, who joined George to play "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" A treat for the fans, but - as the Culture Club reunion tour comes to Britain in December - somewhat superfluous.George's opening act was an ungainly, out-of-tune Dannii Minogue, who didn't even have the courtesy to dress up in anything glam or kitsch. It would be unkind to say anything else about her performance except that she is a very reasonable children's-TV presenter..

NINE-DAY Buddhists and fair- weather dolphin-huggers aside, Hollywood is Hollywood's only religion. As the movies present it, America is a secular territory where urban people make smart remarks and never mention the Crucifixion. Not so in Robert Duvall's The Apostle (12), a passionate, personal movie in which the talk is all of God, in which the good Lord seems willing to help out with everything from mortal wounds to road navigation, and even the cops have a friend in Jesus. As its director, writer, executive producer and star, this is unequivocally Duvall's picture.