Despite the love-god trappings, however, Chico’s persona is as much boy next door as demon lover. The threat of transgression is undercut by a beguiling modesty – if you really can be modest when three-quarters of those present want to get into your pants. But hell, he doesn’t even take his shirt off, though everyone is wondering about what lies beneath that suede-and-virgin-wool carapace. For Chico, it should be noted, has had an awful lot of time to work out.
Having served nearly six years in prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Chico – the youngest member of the DeBarge soul clan, from Grand Rapids, Michigan – had no sooner hit the bricks two years ago than he was re-invented as the latest act in the neoclassical soul stable of record- label boss Kedar Massenburg, the man who put D’Angelo’s hair in cornrows and brought you soul-jazz diva Eryka Bahdu.The album which followed, Long Time No See, is an immaculate slice of old-school soul with echoes of Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder.

The expectation of everyone at this debut London show therefore, was all about whether Chico could live up to his hype.His voice may not be up to Marvin’s baroque flights of fancy but he uses the pipes he’s got extremely well, never straining for an effect and bringing out a showcase melismatic moan or octave jump whenever he needs to raise the emotional temperature. Best of all, he’s a real musician, directing the band from the front and moving from hand-mike to Hammond organ, clarinet to concert grand and even congas as the show progresses In short, he’s absolutely great. His beautifully written songs favour exactly the kind of slow sashaying tempos, sensuous triplet beats and intimate modes of address that once defined soul music at its best, which is close to the best that any music is capable of.There’s a classic Live at the Apollo Stax album on which Otis Redding sings “These Arms of Mine”. As he begins the song, a woman’s voice calls out “Sing it pretty for me Otis!”, and Redding responds with a little miracle of vocal invention, burbling out the purest phrases, like birdsong. Chico isn’t Otis either, but boy, he sure does sing it pretty.. ENO’s new Tales of Hoffmann is a show that thinks big, looks big, fields big names, and addresses major points of musicology: a Company Statement if you ever saw one And the input is impressive.

But the output is equivocal: superb performances in need of a superb production, which they don’t get from the stage director, Graham Vick

Vick never looks the piece straight in the eye. Nor, you suspect, does he believe in it (which would be a useful starting point). Instead he starts by taking refuge in the opera’s title: these are “tales” told to an audience in a space designed (Tobias Hoheisel) to look like an Edwardian music hall. The presentation style is therefore arms-length from the outset, and degenerates into the sort of mildly manic romp someone like Richard Jones would seize and run with But this doesn’t run. It stumbles – or it did on Monday’s first night when, despite a long rehearsal period, the staging hadn’t come together and the romp rang hollow.
The problem, fundamentally, is an undernourished sense of fantasy.

The Antonia scene blossoms, literally, with the high-camp appearance of the dead diva (Jean Rigby) garlanded in floral tributes; but otherwise there’s not much magic on the stage. What is all this, Vick seems to say, but the embroidered recollections of a drunken squirt who fails with women? Proceeding on that basis, he delivers something largely unremarkable, with a particularly dreary Prologue that holds up the action longer than normal.Of course, normality in Hoffmann is a relative concept. There is no fixed edition of the score: it was completed by other hands after Offenbach’s death, leaving subsequent interpreters the task of deciding what should be kept or cut. ENO has decided to excise whatever music didn’t actually derive from Offenbach, including the recitatives, and the septet in the Giulietta scene, leaving what ought to be a short, sharp show.

But then the company has added music which is traditionally left out, and packaged it with extra spoken dialogue which drags the pace and ventures too close to Gilbert & Sullivan for comfort. Tales of Hoffmann is meant to be the piece in which Offenbach escapes from all that.The chief idea in this staging is that all the objets d’amour should be played by the same singer, and likewise all the villains. This is what the composer wanted, and helps to hold together an otherwise loosely related sequence of scenes. But it’s a mighty undertaking for the singers – especially the soprano, who has to encompass in a single evening the high-lying coloratura of a mechanical doll (Olympia), the heartfelt pathos of an adolescent girl (Antonia), and the seductive allure of a worldly courtesan (Giulietta). Sutherland managed it in her time, as did Caballe, but only just.