Lucinda Williams gets recognition for teen angst

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The sound was impeccable, the crowd initially reverential, but teenage petulance personified, Williams first abused the photographers ("this is not a f***ing fashion shoot") then moved onto the audience ("y’all are making things really difficult for me"), whose only crime was to take the occasional blurred mobile-phone photo. What followed was a stand-off between performer and audience. Indeed, were there to be a Brit Award for Most Tense Gig, Williams’s trophy cabinet would have a new bauble.

Robbed of their joy, the chastised crowd stood and gawped. Fuelled by Williams’s foul mood, aside from the Hawaiian-tinged Blue and the acoustic Side Of The Road, she and her understandably twitchy four-man band exchanged subtlety and any remnants of country for a curious but furious guitar squall, part-grunge, part-Neil Young, part Aimee Mann and part Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird.

More curious still, it almost worked (unlike her plaintive plea that "I do have a sense of humour") and Williams’s bared-teeth approach brought renewed authenticity to her distressed Come On and Change The Locks, and to AC/DC’s already bitterly cynical It’s A Long Way To The Top. Listening has rarely been so uneasy.

Lucinda Williams
O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire
Shepherd's Bush Green, W12 8TT