Four years ago Damien Rice could be found playing amid the bare stone and stained glass of the Union Chapel in Islington. The contrast between the quiet, monastic intensity of that performance and the bombastic showboating that was part and parcel of his show this week could not have been more marked.

Back then, the Dublin-born troubadour was a cult hero whose songs cut through a mass of tangled emotions with scalpel-like precision. Now promoting his second album, 9, he is an international star with a bigger axe to swing.

The folk singer part of him was still very much in evidence at the Apollo as he set off, accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar, with a breezy The Professor & la Fille Danse. The stage was decorated with big, thick candles, but also strewn with rock band equipment which was soon manned by his four-person backing group.

Rice switched to piano and picked out the opening notes of Volcano. As the number built by degrees to a climax that was indeed volcanic, drum fills rolled across the bar lines like boulders coming down a mountain, and Rice flayed the melody with a lyric steeped in the agony of rejection. “What I am to you, you do not need,” he yelled like a drowning man.

This strange, existential battle for the soul of the show continued as Rice reverted to the quietest of acoustic modes for Older Chests then cranked up the band for the heavy rock riffing of Woman Like a Man. The audience, herded into the standing-only stalls, were rather caught in the crossfire. During the quiet start of Amie, there were skirmishes between those fans who were inclined to whistle loudly, and others going “Shhhhh!”

By the time the song ended with a rumbling noise that must have registered at West London’s earth tremor monitoring department, some people were actually holding their ears.

It was a bold, if rather careless, exhibition from a man with talent and imagination to spare. During the introduction to Cheers Darlin’ he apparently drank four glasses of red wine, an unusual piece of Method acting that certainly helped him to inhabit the part of the lovelorn drunk in the song. And after the PA had supposedly been turned off, he sang the final encore of Cannonball, from the lip of the stage, alone and entirely unamplified. From a whisper to a scream and back again, and again, and again. The tour continues tonight at Civic Hall, Wolverhampton; tomorrow at Apollo, Manchester

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