On Friday night, Kahlee and I headed over to the Acer Arena to see Sheryl Crow’s opening set for John Mellencamp. After a cracker start with All I Wanna Do, Crow delivered a terrific set of old and new songs, plus excellent covers of Cat Stevens’ The First Cut is the Deepest and Crowded House’s Mean to Me. If I’m going to be honest, the brand new song “inspired by the Dalai Lama” pretty much sucked, but hopefully Shazza will leave the political stuff to Rudd in the future. (Xavier, not Kevin.)

I’ve always been a fan of Crow’s voice, but I never realised how warm and mellow her live sound is, although her breathing doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to. Despite having an extremely polished band probably young enough to have crawled out of her womb, Crow was relaxed and funny, but not too talkative. Her attempts at engaging the audience didn’t really take off, but I’m going to attribute that to the early hour and the impossibility of getting snapped with such a ridiculously long queue at the bar.

I wasn’t a fan of some of the synth sounds used (namely the oddly-placed oriental pipes during the guitar solo of If it Makes You Happy) and I would have liked to see a bit more variation in the arrangements, but what Crow lacked in execution (or proper delivery of Crowded House lyrics – shame to Neil Finn!) she made up for with a good ol’ fashioned ho-down to finish Every Day is a Winding Road. I just wanted to slap my thigh and eat a fried chicken.