Full tilt

The one place you do seem likely to find tall divas like Gallagher is at record labels operated by Jurgen Korduletsch, whose New York-based Radikal label has recently released Gallagher's debut CD, Woman Can Have It. Married to an even taller, supermodelish chanteuse named Claudja Barry, Korduletsch oversaw Barry's almost 20-year career as a Europop voice singing for disco fans. Gallagher's husky, slow alto couldn't be more different from Barry's fast-moving, pastel-hued soprano, but like Barry she aims her performances at dance-club kids. The snide nihilism adrift in the clubland milieu these nights would seem the wrong air for a hearty, soulful voice like Gallagher's to breathe, but until Boy George's brother Kevin got her to sing the stuff, she was living in Zurich and doing a day job designing installation layouts of underground telephone cables.

So here she is, touring the whole US market as the opening act on a 28-date Boy George tour, singing six of her CD's songs full of spirit and a big heart to every audience that cares to see what the former karma chameleon looks and sounds like 10 years after his moments of fame. In Boston the tour was scheduled for Avalon late last month, but poor ticket sales moved it to the much smaller Axis, which for a night was transformed into an ashtray-like slice of the city's emotional sub-basement. The kind of hopeless-in-love blues that Gallagher brings to life was long ago designed to appease people's emotional sub-basements. But not at Axis. The icy crowd seemed more puzzled by her full-tilt soul performance than appeased. It didn't help that she and her band barely knew each other. There she was, suavely pantsuited like a film-noir vamp but fronting a band of college kids in dreadlocks wearing sweats and sneakers, as if they were expecting to back up Ini Kamoze. Disaster awaited, but Gallagher lifted her big black eyes and sidled into "Love Don't Slip Away," a subtle, Lisa Stansfield kind of after-supper song, and for a while you could hear 350 assorted scruffy Boy George on-lookers humming part of the tune.

The moment couldn't last and didn't. When she upped the tempo to "Love Come Down '95" and "Master of Disguise" -- her best-known club hits, in which her alto almost shines as it cleaves joyously through the music -- the Asian kids on my left stopped singing and the five bald heads in front of me ceased to nod. "You Can Have It All," her CD's one Eurodance, mirrored the CD arrangement almost exactly and seemed to catch the audience unprepared.

"It's something new for a band to perform this dance music live without sampling or sequencers, everybody's quite amazed," she told me before the show. Eurodance rules clubland today, but almost no one moved. As for "Last Night," an early-1970s Southern soul blues in which the singer confesses falling out of love with her man "but only for a moment," Gallagher bent her big self almost in half as she collapsed her huge vocal down to a raspy emptiness like an ache that wouldn't go away. It was masterful monologue, the kind of persuasive chanteuse's illusion that makes old music-bistro blues work (and in Zurich, where Gallagher has lived since 1980, fans know all about European bistro blues). But the Axis fans' sensory systems barely noticed the effect -- though most of their hands applauded the music. The only illusion they'd paid to see was Boy George, contradicting himself by covering his true self in sketch -- striped coat, Mickey Mouse ears, and make-up mask while singing (in "God Don't Hold a Grudge") about "I know I kiss the boys but I don't scare too easily." Sure.