Lambchop in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on February 1^st 2015

So, who’s had sex to ‘Nixon’? This is the question that occupies the mind of keys player Tony Crow when Lambchop finish the run through of their acclaimed 2000 release. But that’s Tony Crow. His jokey patter with Kurt Wagner is the saucy digestif after the ‘Nixon’ section of the set, or maybe the apéritif before the miscellany that follows, and the general content can be gleaned from the subject matter and punchlines – country living (“What do you hunt?” “Something to fuck”); Katy Perry’s imminent Superbowl performance (“I hope we see more than her nipple”); the dyslexic dog (“He sits on your face and licks your lap”).

Tonight’s show is their first Irish visit since the ‘Mr M’ tour in 2012 and while Tony’s jokes are new, the album they are celebrating is now a sagely fifteen years old, well-worn and well-known to the all-seated National Concert Hall Crowd. The band form a semi-circle onstage with band mainstay Kurt Wagner seated at the end, leaving an open space in the middle with the focus on the collective rather than the individual.

Album and set opener The Old Gold Shoe is frustratingly marred by some dodgy sound issues. A few voices in the crowd alert the band though – a guitar is inaudible, Wagner is unintelligible. “You’ve heard the album, right” he jibes the crowd in response, but the vocals are back on track by the time Up With People comes around.

As is always the way with an album retrospective, the surprises are few, but a performance from a band of Lambchop’s calibre is always going to be something to hear. From the deftly soulful Grumpus to a lovely cut of The Distance From Her To There, ‘Nixon’ gets its dues, and the players theirs as Wagner introduces each once it’s done. “That’s Nixon!” he concludes, jumping up from his seat, and once the formality of that album is out of the way the set becomes a much looser, even more enjoyably unkempt affair.

Crow’s X-rated banter is the ideal slip road into the funk soul groove of Curtis Mayfields’ Give me Your Love. The band then dip into their mid-nineties period until Wagner informs us that “we’ve come to that point in the evening where I’m about to piss myself”, and ‘Mr M’ track Gone Tomorrow – with its extended coda that’s at odds with Wagner’s need to piss – sees the band off.

The band’s upstanding horn player and the night’s unsung hero returns to introduce the inimitable Mr Tony Crow, before Crow in turn brings the band back on to regale them and us with a bit of canine filth in advance of Bowie’s Nixon-referencing Young Americans. As much of a career landmark as it is, ‘Nixon’ took time to find its feet on this occasion. It’s certainly a testament to any record’s power that a certain amount of folk have had sex while it’s on. That’s unquantifiable tonight. The bawdy cabaret that followed in its wake was the more memorable aspect of this bipartite set, but even a sometime raggedy Lambchop leave most in their shadow.