Dolly seems tired when she hits the stage tonight. It's been nineteen long years since she came to this era, and the strain is starting to show. The current tour can't have helped - a sixty-four date marathon, culminating in tonight's gig at the Dividend. It was supposed to be a triumphant return to the scene of her first performance, but Dolly doesn't look like she feels like celebrating.

As Dolly launches into a lacklustre rendition of My Long-Necked Lover From Liverpool I cast my mind back to that first gig.

I was a fledgling reporter, low down in the pecking order, assigned to cover what was expected to be a novelty act at best. Dolly bounded clumsily onto the stage with gleeful energy, her footfalls shaking the converted cinema and causing tiny flakes of plaster to rain down onto the audience. She gave an incongruous high-pitched saurian giggle, and carefully wedged her huge bulk behind a hammond organ.

None of us quite knew what to expect, but Dolly rocked us that night. When she left the stage the cheers could be heard as far as Reading.

Very soon, Dolly was to go on to become a global phenomenon, but I, I had been there at the beginning.

Little did I know I was also about to be there for the end.

In latter years the raw energy of Dolly's act has been toned down somewhat, the joyful, upbeat songs, full of naive curiosity, like You Funny Little Creatures and Flying Machines have been replaced with more soulful, reflective numbers, like Where Have All the Pterodactyls Gone? and It's a Mammal's World. It's this song she starts to play now.

Her mournful, honking voice sours out over the auditorium, with all the verve of the Dolly of yore, and we're spellbound for a few short bars, but abruptly she draws to a faltering halt. "I feel ...old..." she mumbles.

A single tear gathers in the corner of one enormous eye and starts to slide down her scaled cheek and her greying snout droops lower over the keyboard. An embarrassed silence falls over the crowd.

She lifts her head up wearily and looks out over us. For a second I lock gazes with this fabulous prehistoric creature, then the light in her eyes goes out and she slumps down, sliding heavily off her specially reinforced stool, her tail sweeping through the drumkit in passing, and knocking it flying.

A diminutive white coated figure rushes out from the wings, and runs over to her.

"Dolly! Dolly! Wake up! It's me, Professor Heliotrope!"

He slaps frantically at her slack muzzle, trying to get her to respond. She's quite dead though.

"Dolly! I've repaired the machine. I was going to tell you after the show!" His eyes start to blink furiously behind his heavy steel glasses. "Dolly...Sweetheart...I can send you back!"

He moves forward and cradles her huge head in his lap, as her eyes begin to film over.

"...I can send you back," he repeats quietly.

As the audience files sombrely from the Dividend, leaving the professor still disbelievingly stroking Dolly's cold scaly snout, a black-haired girl ahead of me pulls at her partner's jacket, and whispers to him.

"Wow, that was so intense."

"Nah," he replies,"nowhere near as emotional as My Chemical Romance."