Best known as the man behind Nancy Sinatra's 1966 hit These Boots Are Made For Walking, Lee Hazlewood at first seemed an unlikely candidate for a venue as big as the Royal Festival Hall.
But Nick Cave, who booked Hazlewood as part of his Meltdown festival, clearly knows a thing or two about the pulling-power of a singer of dark country ballads with twisted double-meanings.
After a series of newspaper features, re-releases of obscure Hazlewood albums, and the announcement that the Harry Dean Stanton Ensemble would be supporting, Hazlewood's name suddenly became the only one to drop - quite an achievement for a 70-year-old man who hasn't had a hit in over 30 years.
In the event, Stanton was a let-down. The star of such cult films as Paris, Texas and Repo Man ambled into the spotlight looking suave, skinny and completely plastered, then proceeded to drawl along to a set of bar-room rock and blues numbers with a total lack of panache. His Ensemble, who seemed lost on such a large stage, were capable but uninspiring. But Hazlewood, on the other hand, put in a performance that even his most obsessive fans could not have dared hope for. From the moment he came on stage, looking not a day over 50, he was captivating. "You wouldn't pay £20 for an old horse, would you?" he asked the full-to-bursting auditorium. "Well, you just did." He launched into one of his many obscure gems, a song called Rider On A White Horse, and his unmistakeably mournful, gravel-toned voice sounded as good as ever. It is testament to Hazlewood's charm that he could get away with playing a handful of trad jazz and twenties supper-club songs to a crowd that had come to hear the gothic country for which he is (sort of) famous, and testament to his professionalism that he knew better than to disappoint by not performing any of his classics.
Pray Them Bars Away was a high point; a cowboy-baroque hard luck ode to the boredom of prison life, as was a jolly western tune about a dead prostitute called Feathers. One disappointment was his reducing the wonderfully ominous sixties classic Some Velvet Morning to its furtively filthy first line: "Some velvet morning when I'm straight/I'm going to open up your gate". Which was apparently regarded as quite innocent at the time.
Hazlewood ended the show with the inevitable These Boots Are Made For Walking and an ultra-sleazy version of Whole Lotta Shakin' that seemed to sum up his enduring charm: the kind of guy who everybody wants to know and nobody wants to leave their daughter with. A welcome return to the fray by a true original.
