You'd think she could have doled out a little of her record company advance on some new clothes for her bandmates -

You'd think she could have doled out a little of her record company advance on some new clothes for her bandmates - as well as some drums for Connet, who tapped on a box all evening.On record, Thom clearly has talent. She has since soared forth from cyberspace, and RCA/Sony have signed her up for a five-album deal worth £1m. So Thom is another net sensation, following the Arctic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley. The latter's song "Crazy" is the first single ever to get to No 1 on downloads alone, and in a show of net solidarity, Thom cheekily plays it tonight "as a treat". The chanteuse is flanked by her unkempt band members, the guitarist Marcus Bonfanti and the drummer Craig Connet, in this clammy venue. After her decrepit car broke down between gig venues too many times, the nu-folk wailer decided to DIY it from home.

She broadcast her musical musings via a 60-quid webcam in her south London flat (she has clearly lifted the furniture from her "basement sessions" for tonight's performance) and staged a three-week "net tour". On the first night of her webcast 70 surfers logged on to watch After two weeks, she had 70,000 web viewers. Avid surfers had "chosen" the embryonic Thom, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter from Banff, a small fishing village on the coast of north-east Scotland. "This is a bit of a crazy thing for us, really," confides the petite and exceptionally long-haired Sandi Thom, who was playing gigs from her Tooting basement only a week ago. To take the work out of the politics of the time is also a political gesture. Shostakovich on Stage, Coliseum, London WC2 (0870 145 0200; www.eno ), 20 to 29 July. For the younger generation, the more crazy it is the better."Perhaps that is to underestimate the potential fascination with the original across the generations, a fascination to see what Stalin rightly or wrongly judged to be a true Soviet ballet.

He said of The Golden Age: " We will try to get across the theatrical side of him. If you want to bring the intellectual and rational, you won't get a very good result It's more crazy and unpredictable. It will be the original ballet."So there may be some talking still to be done. But it is the philosophy of Gergiev, the presiding genius of this revelatory season, that will hold sway. It was a big shield for capitalism, and designed to show that capitalism was wrong."It will be interesting to see what Maxim Shostakovich makes of the update. Gelber says: "Dmitri Shostakovich was before his time and would have been fully open to new ideas," but Maxim Shostakovich told me: "I would like it to be as it was.

And there's a football star from this team who meets a European girl, and they have some inter-reaction and later they look back on their lives from the present day."And so, what was a story of athletic, pure Soviet youth overcoming the temptations of the decadent and corrupt West, has become a love story between Soviet and Westerner "The original version," Gelber says, "is extremely biased. The Golden Age will be shorn of the propagandist element as Stalin saw it. In the case of the Leningrad Symphony, the stirring version of the ballet, which I watched in St Petersburg, is deliberately ambivalent. With its red backdrop, is it purely a triumphalist piece about the Soviets rebuffing the Nazis during the siege of Leningrad -- or is it a more complex piece on the siege of Russian souls by the Sovet leaders?Backstage at the Mariinsky, I talked to Gergiev, Shostakovich's son, Maxim, and the American choreographer Noah Gelber, who said of his new version of The Golden Age: " The original story revolved around a Russian football team that comes to Europe, and we do keep a Soviet team, coming to an Olympic event. Gergiev brings a Shostakovich On Stage season to the London Coliseum in July. But what we will see will not be what Stalin or his Sovet heirs wanted us to see.The Mariinsky's celebrated artistic director, the conductor Valery Gergiev,, wants to bring the composer out of the shadow of politics and of his unwilling association with Stalin and subsequent Soviet regimes, and to concentrate on his theatricality.