Live Review: Sarah Blasko, Cameron Avery

It's a brave artist who chooses to face an audience with just songs and a voice, rather than having the hiding places a band can provide. But somehow you knew Sarah Blasko could manage it. For that incredibly human, emotional, crystalline voice, along with words that never seem less than honest, centres her craft.

Also going it alone for the purpose of this exercise was Cameron Avery, who recently returned from making a name for himself in America. But where his glorious Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams album came with cascades of neon Vegas strings and such, here it's just himself and a keyboard or guitar, so things like the faltering relationship of Wasted On Fidelity get more noir-ish. Dance With Me is an even more unsteady waltz, sounding more like music for that bar where you're not sure how you got there, let alone how you're getting home. Although, the twists and turns of C'est Toi do have some tenderness to it. He's nervously witty to a crowd where few know him, but they enjoy "all the hits" he delivers.    

For her part, Sarah Blasko appears out of the darkness to start off as raw as you can get: a capella to pin-drop silence, a theatrical flourish provided by an almost operatic outfit: flared Pagliacci sleeves, which might owe just a little to Seinfeld's pirate shirt. Either way, it couldn't have made playing that grand piano she spent much of the evening behind any easier.

Songs are grab-bagged from across her catalogue. Down On Love, I Awake, to the more recent astounding gender-fluid expression of longing, I Wanna Be Your Man, where her voice swoops and glides in turns. She even throws in a new song, which speaks of "living in another's heartbeat" — probably the child that now grounds and focusses her. There's detours via guitar and "even smaller guitar" to the romance of Luxurious and We Won't Run to finish the set proper, before Blasko makes the obligatory return for her to deal with the rules of "encore anxiety" — apparently, even your favourite artists should offer "no more than three songs" to finish up. But those three are perfectly measured: All I Want, her sublime reading of Cold Chisel's Flame Trees, and back to her first album for the seldom-played Perfect Now. She stands, bows, remembers to pick up the shoes she kicked off about three songs in and exits to applause.