Kris Kristofferson at The Olympia Theatre

There’s a fair few photos hanging on the wall in Maureen’s Bar at the back of the Olympia Theatre. Panto stars, comedians, even the odd rocker, but one really stands out. It’s Maureen Grant, the grande dame of Dame Street who has been serving drinks here since 1949, in an embrace with Kris Kristofferson. It doesn’t look like some staged clinch either; they’re properly going for it. Coffey and I asked her about it one night. “Oh yeah. That's a man.”, she said, laughing, “I would have ran off with him!”

Even now, not long after his eighty-second birthday, you can still see what Maureen was talking about. The colour may be faded from his still enviably full head of hair, as it has from that beard - which could probably impregnate people from a distance back in the seventies, and there are of course wrinkles, but he’s still a fine looking man. When he casually walks on stage to a huge roar you’re immediately reminded of everything from the A Star Is Born album cover, the one where himself and Barbara Streisand are all over each other, to, I dunno, Blade 2, to one of the greatest movies ever made, Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Iconic doesn't even come close to describing him.

‘Shipwrecked In The Eighties’ as an opener, Kristofferson plucking his Gibson and wheezing into his harmonica, could have been written yesterday. Lines like “I can’t see the light anymore, all those horizons that I used to guide me are gone” reflect where his country is now as much as it did back in the age of shoulder pads.

I had no idea until he said it, but his backing band tonight are only Merle Haggard’s actual Strangers – Kristofferson toured with Haggard before his death and once said of him “Merle was my hero years before he was my friend, he was the hero of every serious songwriter in Nashville.” Scott Joss, the multi-instrumentalist who has helped out on a lot of Dwight Yoakam records as well as Haggard’s, steps forward to croon ‘That’s The Way That Love Goes’. Later on he’ll also take over for ‘Okie From Muskogee’, ‘I Think I’ll Just Stay Here And Drink’, and beautiful versions of ‘Sing Me Back Home’ and ‘Ramblin’ Fever’. It’s an unexpected treat for Hag fans and it also gives Kristofferson a chance to take a break.

The lyrics of ‘Darby’s Castle’ are still heart breaking, and it’s followed by the road romance of ‘Me And Bobby McGee’, which provides the loving crowd with their first opportunity to take over the singing. There are no two ways about it, the rich baritone that Kristofferson once had is a thing of the past but, if anything, the husky croak that remains adds an even more lived-in romantic quality to these immortal songs. As a writer, he has few peers – Haggard? Willie Nelson? Waylon Jennings? Little wonder they put The Highwaymen together back in the eighties, although Haggard politely refused the offer. The drunken gleam in the eye of the narrator of ‘Best Of All Possible Worlds’, the scene in the roadside café in ‘Here Comes That Rainbow Again’, the sure-we-might-as-well wink in ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’, the woman who puts on new stockings just to please her lover in ‘Casey’s Last Ride’ – I’d love to live in a Kristofferson song but I could never, ever be cool enough.

“I wrote this for my kids” he says, before 'From Here To Forever', a song I hadn’t heard before. “The smile on your face while you’re sleeping is the answer to anyone’s prayer”, he sings over his gently strummed guitar, and then the voice cracks as he reaches for the high note going in to the chorus. It takes me a few moments to realise that I’m crying. I’m thinking about my own beautiful daughters, how proud I am of the women they’re too fast becoming, and how much I miss holding the little girls they were in my arms. That time is gone and lost and just as it must happen to all parents, they’ve started to need me less and less. “And darlin’ if we’re not together, there’s one thing I want you to know, I’ll love you from here to forever, and be there wherever you go.”

Every time you put on a record, every time you go to a show, you’re hoping to be moved like this. Kristofferson’s song writing tears out your heart and hands it back to you. “Take all the time you are given, be all you know you can be, and if you need a reason for living, do it for love, and for me” I’m listening to the song as I type this, and I’m crying again. You might hear it and feel nothing. That’s the inexplicable way of it with music. It’s pointless me even trying to write it down.

Where do you go after that? The regretful longing in ‘Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)’, the broken man in ‘Duvalier’s Dream', and, God help me, more children at the end of ‘Jody & The Kid’.

There has never been, nor will there ever be, a song that captures the pain and desolation of a savage hangover as accurately as ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’. If you’re unfamiliar with the experience, then good for you, but you can take my word for it. ‘For The Good Times’ and ‘A Moment Of Forever’ are two sides of the same coin, Kristofferson telling a lover that even though their time is gone, they can be thankful they had it at all. ‘A Moment Of Forever’ is, perhaps, the better song, which is indeed saying something, considering the former was good enough for the likes of Elvis and Al Green to record.

‘Why Me’ is a lyric so powerful, it could bring the most vehement anti-Godder back to Jesus, and it that wasn’t enough, the first line of the finale, ‘Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends’ – “this may be our last night together” - is just devastating. You can see it on every face in the room, Kristofferson is their adored hero, but we know that this, most probably, is our last night together.

It’s likely a deliberately structured goodbye, a noble and dignified exit. You would expect nothing less. After the tickets for these two nights flew out the door, Kristofferson arranged a third show, donating all the profits to the ISPCC and Childline. Maureen was right. That is a man.