"Anybody wanna hear some rockabilly?" asks Imelda May. A year ago, this might have felt like an invitation to be covered in boiling oil, but May's emergence as a major star has rescued the idea of rockabilly from the tyranny of 1980s chart-toppers Matchbox and Shakin' Stevens. The singer's Top 10 Mayhem album seems even to be making 1950s styles cool, with teenage girls in the audience sporting variations on the Imelda look. Not that anyone could upstage the fabulously styled singer, in her vintage dress and blond kiss curl, which appears to have been sculpted from ice cream.

With husband Darrel Higham – a classic, Duane Eddy-style twanger – by her side, May slips out of rockabilly and into blues and New Orleans jazz, covering Howlin' Wolf as well as Elvis. The woozy trumpet is as much part of the refreshed sound as an upright double bass – slapped so hard it shakes the building. Central to the eruption is May's Dublin-roughened whipcracker of a voice, and the excited whoops and "Weeeeeeeeellllll"s that suggest she's listened to Eddie Cochran as much as her idol, Wanda Jackson.

Songs describing rumpuses, stalkers and sexual predators are delivered with oodles of energy and one-liners. "I love your wits, I love your wobbly bits," May howls during Inside Out's homage to unconditional love. In the dangerously rocking Proud and Humble, she gets the whole audience to sing: "Oh yes I'm proud, hell yeah." Her palette stretches from raucous to moody, but her breathless introduction to a rocked-over Tainted Love captures the Dubliner's appeal: "Are yous ready to rock? Are yous ready for a sing song?"