The long and chequered career of John Hiatt has finally seen him emerge as a time-honoured American songwriter, admired for his own albums and much in demand as a songwriter to performers in the rock, country and Americana fields. If there's a fly in Hiatt's ointment, it's the lingering suspicion that fundamentally he's a jobbing songwriter rather than a truly inspired one. Throughout this performance there was plenty of comical banter and a high degree of technical expertise, but at the end of the night you still felt as if the occasion had fallen half-a-dozen songs short of greatness.
Part of the problem may be that Hiatt is so used to writing with other potential singers in mind that his songs rarely feel as if they're exclusively personal to him. You don't expect everything he writes to offer piercing glimpses into his psyche, but tunes like My Old Friend or Tennessee Plates tend to provoke only insipid descriptions like "pleasant" or "quite good". Even when Hiatt sat at the piano to sing Have a Little Faith in Me, the confessional bloodletting of the recorded version was replaced by a veneer of detached professionalism.
The highlights of the set emerged in places where you wouldn't expect to find them. Cry Love was cranked up from modest beginnings into a stomping, freewheeling groove, Hiatt lurching dementedly around the stage while his backing trio, the Goners, worked themselves up to a frantic high-speed ending. Particularly startling was their final encore, a sprawling open-ended thing drenched in reverb and psychedelic guitars, as if Hiatt were suddenly indulging a long-suppressed passion for Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead.
The Goners never missed a beat, with Sonny Landreth delivering an extended masterclass in slide guitar (his intricate picking technique using the third and fourth fingers of his right hand looked as if it could form the basis of a whole series of textbooks). If anything, Landreth is overqualified for the job, since often Hiatt's own more basic guitar work did all that was required, like his jagged Telecaster outburst during Lincoln Town. But maybe Hiatt needs a mid-life crisis to kick his writing into high gear again.
