Steve Earle at the Olympia - 17 November

There's a terrible feeling as you watch some musicians growing old that they're just going through the motions and tarnishing whatever they achieved in the past. There are other musicians who don't buckle under the years and when you watch them you think they will still cut it and mean it at 75.

Steve Earle has nothing to fear from the decades to come.

Earle's new album is called 'Townes', a collection of covers of songs by the late singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, a man he describes as "a friend and a teacher". Part tribute, part memoir, all class, the Olympia setlist brought together Van Zandt and Earle's music with memories, anecdotes and observations. It began with Van Zandt's 'Where I Lead Me' and ended nearly two hours later with a standing ovation. The journey from one to the other was thrilling and life-affirming - the kind of gig you come home from to play albums half the night. In this case by two artists, not one.

It's a rare joy these days to go to a show where the only time the audience opened their mouths was to sing along, and Earle is such a master performer that he had each row hooked on his every word and chord. 'Pancho and Lefty', 'Tom Ames' Prayer', 'Mr Mudd and Mr Gold' 'The Galway Girl', 'To Live Is to Fly'… all superb, and as a show where someone summons the presence of another this was a very powerful experience. By the end you felt that there were two people on the stage, but you could only see one of them.

For encores there were brilliant versions of Earle's cover of Tom Waits' 'Way Down in the Hole' from 'The Wire' and his own 'Guitar Town' and 'Copperhead Road'. You left a lot warmer than you came in.

Harry Guerin