Willie Nelson is so impeccably grizzled that he has moved into a realm to which the phrase "elder statesman" scarcely begins to do justice. Ambling on stage a few days past his 75th birthday, his absurdly battered guitar slung around his neck, this icon looks not so much a performer as a living history lesson.
He has been on the road, on and off, for well over 50 years, but his staging could not be more minimal. Surrounded by five utterly unobtrusive musicians, including his 78-year-old sister Bobbie Lee on piano, Nelson plants himself beneath a Texan state flag and fires out hits as if entertaining a saloon bar, pausing only to swap his weathered Stetson for a lurid red bandana.
Yet the visual cliches are misleading. Nelson has always been so much more than a country singer, ever since the 1970s, when he rejected the lachrymose, sentimental hokum of Nashville in favour of experimenting with jazz, folk and blues. He also has a peerless back catalogue to draw upon, as exemplified by a dizzying early segue of self-penned material, including Faron Young's Hello Walls and Patsy Cline's Crazy.
He is a consummate performer, wrapping his gruff, surprisingly tender vocal around standards such as Kris Kristofferson's Help Me Make It Through the Night and his own Red Headed Stranger. Yet tonight is no nostalgia fest: a new track, Now I Gotta Get Over You Again, is pained and poignant, and he ends with Superman, a song he wrote last year as a defiant retort to a doctor who recommended that he slow down. It is not advice that Willie Nelson looks likely to heed any day soon.
