If she hadn't sold millions of country-blues-rock records and won a stetson-full of Grammies, Bonnie Raitt could have had a career peddling the secrets of timeless, youthful joie de vivre . At 53, she has the slender figure of a 19-year-old cheerleader, and her famous red hair still tumbles like a wall of flame.
Not just surviving, but revelling in life on the road after 30-plus years, the former rehab patient puts her physical endurance down to drinking water for the past 13 years. However, she hints at a more enjoyable aspect to her regime. "This one's about getting it in middle age," she shrieks. "Amazing, isn't it?!" Her mischievous mood is an unexpected delight in a riotous, marathon show peppered with tomfoolery.
Raitt is in Britain promoting the new album The Best of Bonnie Raitt, but she ignores its track listing and plucks out songs at random. ("That way we mean it.") The set takes in raunchy blues, funk and subtle African flavours; it stretches from Woman Be Wise, on her 1971 debut, to a clutch from her recent album, Silver Lining, including the lovely title track, written by David Gray.
Implausibly, Raitt may be in her prime. The way she shrieks, "I'm a woman, not a girl," would turn most men to jelly, and her new songs receive the benefit of her kiss-off attitude and perfectly lived-in voice. But she pays credit to her team, a band who capture her New Orleans honky-tonk vibe and a crew who double as hapless victims of her wicked humour. "Steve, it's floppy!" she moans at her microphone technician, holding the limp instrument aloft to uproar.
The japes conceal the absorbing musical mood swings that have maintained her musical vitality. Raitt, whose website boasts a whole section devoted to "activism", performs Mose Allison's Vietnam song, Everybody's Cryin' Mercy, "because it seems the right time to sing it again", and she dismisses US foreign policy as if she were swatting a fly. After the political comes the emotional, including a tear-stained I Can't Make You Love Me that displays the endearing human being behind the strong facade. After two standing ovations, she promises to return "if I'm still mobile!" - which can hardly be in doubt.
· At the Olympia, Dublin, tomorrow. Box office: 00 353 167 7774. Then touring.
