John Hiatt says goodbye (maybe)

Last night’s gig at the O2’s Indigo was prominently billed, John Hiatt pointed out, as being part of his Farewell Tour. “If I come back next year,” he said, “what are we going to call it?” Or words to that effect.

I’m inclined to think that whoever thought up the title might have been correct. At 73, quite frankly, Hiatt doesn’t have much of a voice left. The straining to hit the higher notes wasn’t helped, early in the set, when his tuning gizmo misled him into tweaking his whole guitar a semitone high. It wasn’t until a dozen of the 20 songs had gone by that his use of a harmonica revealed the error. Somebody came up with a replacement gizmo, the tuning was corrected, and the last run of songs sounded more comfortable.

So perhaps he will be back, encouraged by the warmth of the response from those who had made the journey to the ghastly O2’s more intimate performance space and who feel an enormous fondness towards a man who may never have achieved the solo stardom many forecast as he went from label to label during his early years but who, despite all the many successful covers his songs have racked up, remains the best interpreter of songs that tend to stay in the heart.

Here we had a selection of compositions dating from 1987 to 2010, plus a brand-new one, the sentimental ballad “Weightless in My Arms”. His choice included the title tracks of the albums Slow Turning, Perfectly Good Guitar, Riding with the King, Crossing Muddy Waters, Master of Disaster and The Open Road. There were the big earners: “Thing Called Love”, “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “Tennessee Plates”, which Ridley Scott used in the soundtrack to Thelma & Louise. There were beauties like “Miles to Go”, “Real Fine Love”, “Long Time Comin'”, “Thunderbird”, “The River Knows Your Name”, “Lift Up Every Stone”, “Adios to California” and “Feels Like Rain”. There was a special welcome for “Memphis in the Meantime”, from Bring the Family, the 1987 album which, with accompaniment by Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner, really established his reputation.

I was particularly grateful for “Across the Borderline”, the song he wrote in 1982 with Cooder and Jim Dickinson for Tony Richardson’s film The Border. I remember him singing it at Hammersmith Odeon with Cooder, Lowe and Keltner in 1992, when they were known as Little Village, and the effect it had. It was covered in concert by Dylan and Springsteen, and I wrote a long piece about it at the time, which gave birth in the Independent on Sunday (thanks to Tim de Lisle, then the paper’s arts editor) to a much-imitated series called Lives of the Great Songs. It’s a song to rank with Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” for its poignancy and enduring relevance.

Had this been a request show, what would I have asked for that Hiatt didn’t select from his reportoire of songs about cars, rivers and the mysteries of human heart? Oh, “Icy Blue Heart”, “Lipstick Sunset”, “Unoriginal Sin”. “The Way We Make a Broken Heart”. And “All the Lilacs in Ohio”, from his last album, Leftover Feelings, with the great Jerry Douglas.

If you were there last night without knowing anything about him, which seems unlikely, you might have been made uncomfortable by the frailty of the singing and the lengthy tuning difficulties. (But you might have enjoyed his joke about adopting Guy Clark’s approach to tuning, which involves selecting the one string that’s definitely out and tuning the rest to that.) Mostly I think, we were just grateful to see him, to hear those wonderful songs from the man who wrote them, and to say hello. Or goodbye. Or whatever it was.