However, when they do get something right they do so in spectacular style and possibly their best idea for some time, beating even duck paté and teaching Zinedine Zidane how to perform a Glasgow kiss, was to put a live music venue on the first floor of their beloved Eiffel Tower.

As the first in a series of three gigs organised around Europe by Coca-Cola to showcase emerging talent alongside established artists in spectacular venues, a certain Siouxie Sioux (minus the Banshees) was persuaded to don her catsuit, belt out some classy new material and generally enjoy a view of Paris that must have been even more spectacular from on-stage than it was to us proletarians in the audience.

The support bands were chosen on merit by Siouxie. Headland, a five piece band from London who are very much riding the pseudo dance/indie wave of frenetic beats and angsty vocals, were the chief support act and they had enough spark to light up several hundred of the tacky mini Eiffel Tower models being hocked to the tourists queuing outside. Their combination of a mustachioed, be-suited front man and pretty keyboard player was pleasing to the eye and ear but it's a shame that not many people took the trouble to turn up earlier as Headland, judging from their classy recital and recent press interest, could well be rivalling the Klaxons and Shitdisco next year for the indie disco kids crown.

And so, after Headland had packed their kit away and a black-clad team had installed enough instrumentation to make the north side of the tower groan louder than a Frenchman losing at boule and spilling his port, it was time. First her black-clad band came on and then, with a tension-building pause, Miss Sioux entered stage right.

Quite how she got her seamstress to sew her into her silver catsuit, a garment that sat between glam rock-style grandiose and something you might expect to be wearing if you were an extra in Flash Gordon, was anyone's guess. She actually looked in impressively good nick for her age and there was not a bulge out of place or a love handle to be seen.

The set was almost entirely, and somewhat selfishly, made up of new material from this year's MantaRay solo album (her first) that mostly bordered on a sort of soft rock Marilyn Manson or a dodgy Depeche Mode remix. That's not to say either ends of the musical spectrum are bad, it's just not what you'd expect from the dark, brooding personality promoted by the artist for the past three decades.

But everyone has to move forward and, if this is Siouxie Sioux's new solo direction, then it could win her a lot more fans than the previous dark gothic punk numbers she's associated with. Into A Swan is one such example of a new track that typifies her performance; it thuds along with bursts of scuzzy electronica and grinding guitar punctuated by her trademark powerful vocal style but with the added visual treat of a few high kicks.

Her mastery of the French language was also impressive but not so helpful when she introduced each song in the lingo. My greatest achievement in France that day was to correctly order a beer in French rather than tell the barmaid I wanted four of something in German.

So this was one thing the French almost got right again; the venue was superb, the views astonishing, the bands all impressive. But, if we're honest, Siouxie's bacofoil outfit belonged around the Christmas turkey on the top shelf of a pre-heated fan oven, rather than on the slender thighs of a 50-year-old rock legend on a chilly Parisian evening.

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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees