She finished with Company – her spellbinding voice accompanied by piano and bass. The yearning was real ‘So now you’re going off to live your life/ You say we’ll meet each other now and then/ But we’ll never be the same/ And I know I’ll never have this chance again’.

The standing ovation was fully deserved. Rickie Lee Jones’ aching, fragile, whispering, chatty, and still glorious vocals are well suited to the pristine acoustics of Bridgewater Hall. We were treated to every track from her eponymous debut album and the follow up Pirates.

At 56, she is radiant and accompanied by a fine band including a trumpet player so cool he could pass as the love child of Miles Davis. Last Chance Texaco is a Jack Kerouac-Springsteen influenced ode distilled with her own charm. Weary and haunting, she was just 22 when she wrote it using the car and the road as a plea for another chance at love. Her remarkable voice even mimics the whine of a Buick flashing past as its taillights fade to a red dot.

That debut 1979 album is studded with diamond tracks. The stand out was the poignant On Saturday Afternoons in 1963 – a heartbreaking reflection on years gone by.

Her break up with the gravel-voiced Tom Waits was the inspiration for Pirates. Opening track We Belong Together captures a broken woman, ditched and bruised – and 30 years on the venom is still there.

Living It Up was a marvellous funky jazz epic – sprawling and peppered with wonderful lyrics like ‘sad-eyed Sinatras’. Yet the lyrically simple A Lucky Guy had as much punch.

Her demons of broken love and drug addiction well behind her, Jones remains sassy, engaging, sometimes unsure, sometimes confident.

I just wish I had seen her as red-beret wearing 23-year-old singing her newly minted stash of gold from Coolsville.

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