Until Jarvis Cocker invited Melanie to play at Meltdown earlier this year, the one-time hippie princess and Woodstock heroine must have thought British audiences had completely forgotten her. It had, after all, been more than 30 years since she last appeared here - but now that she's back she seem as confident as ever.

She may be 60 and rather larger than in her glory days, but Melanie came on looking as if flower power was still in bloom, sporting a coloured kaftan and sparkling red hair piece. "I guess you loved the me you loved before ..." she sang (thus winning the desired response of "We still love you" from an audience who still remembered her songs), and then she was off, mixing the old hits with a batch of new material co-written with her guitarist, her son Beau, "because it's good to grow your own".

There were some patches when she was almost in tune, and many others - as on Ruby Tuesday - where her singing was truly dreadful. But she was always entertaining. She displayed a fine sense of humour, especially when discussing her early career and the annoyingly catchy hit, Brand New Key, "which doomed me to be cute for the rest of my life". But equally unexpected was the discovery that she is still a good song-writer. Her best offering of the night was not an oldie like Animal Crackers, but the new Smile, a thoughtfully cheerful anthem written after 9/11, "when people were actually nice to each other for a few weeks".

Kathryn Williams, who opened, is a very different guitar-strumming female singer-songwriter - not just because she is far younger and from Newcastle, but because she really can sing. It's six years since she was nominated for a Mercury prize, and her gently powerful, intriguingly personal songs surely deserve even more recognition.