Aimee Mann, Royal Festival Hall, London - review Aimee Mann may not have millions of fans, but those she does have are ferociously loyal. On Monday night, they filled the Royal Festival Hall to hear her play her first British concert in over four years. The cynical American singer-songwriter has never been afraid to see life's glass as half empty - or even smashed in pieces on the floor. Though her melodies are infectiously poppy, her song narratives are largely about alienation, disillusionment and deceit. Her latest album, Charmer, is entirely devoted to the ulterior motives and fatal impact of the slicksters who use and abuse those who fall for their charm. It was with a handful of songs from this album that Mann and her four-piece band opened the show. Inspired by what the 52-year-old has called the "super pop" of the Seventies and Eighties, the tracks, filled with synths and soaring harmonies, were colourful and catchy: particularly Labrador, in which Mann wryly compares herself to a mistreated pet who always "came back for more." But at times, the crowded arrangements meant that Mann's low voice and deft lyrics ("That's all, that's it, you got yourself disappeared/The atom split, and you got back-engineered"), were a little lost in the mix. Later, she began delving into her back catalogue, and it was on some of these more subdued, stripped-down songs that Mann's fragile yet deeply powerful voice really came into its own. An acoustic performance of the wistful Save Me - her best-known song, and one of a clutch of her tracks featured in the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia - had the audience transfixed, while unvarnished versions of the melancholic Fourth of July and the angst-ridden ballad Ghost World were similarly moving. A waifish figure in jeans and dark-rimmed glasses, with a tendency to do little more than shift from one foot to another while performing, Mann at times looked more like a gangly schoolgirl than a middle-aged musician with eight albums under her belt. Her stage presence, however, was quietly charismatic, and her self-deprecating patter with the audience - she teasingly began Save Me, for which she lost out on both an Academy Award and Golden Globe for best song to Phil Collins, with the alternative lyrics "Phil Collins/Why did you take my awards?" - raised appreciative chuckles. She was, in a word, charming.