BB KING

BB KING (Waterfront Hall, Belfast)

The man looks shagged out. Diabetes, arthritis and 72 years on this earth – over 50 of those as a roving ambassador of the blues – have left their mark on BB King. The purple lamé jacket can’t disguise the stoop. The enormous cummerbund and the chest-high old man’s trousers fail to disguise his physical state.

But that’s before he straps on his Gibson (Lucille to his friends) and plays some of his typically svelte licks. Inbetweentimes, he’s bawling out the anthemic ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ and he slaps his palm with an enormous fist. Everybody in the hall roars and BB loses 20 years in an instant. Lovely.

Time has hardly diminished his timing, his neat phrasing or his booming, gospel-shaped voice. He’s tossing picks into the crowd and intoning ‘Why I Sing The Blues’, as his road-tested big band (the ‘newcomer’ bassman is a mere 13 years in the group) parps and swings and raises an infectious boogaloo.

Blues scholars may argue the toss about this man’s contribution to the genre. He’s perhaps too slick, too keen to sell the music to a slack-minded, middle-class audience. But the joy on the author’s face is fantastically transparent. And even though he hams his way through ‘Since I Met You Baby’, it’s hard not to like the fun.

He plays a good deal of the show sitting down, and that’s understandable too. But by the close of the night, his energy level has been replenished by the love that’s fizzing back across the auditorium. He showers the acolytes with BB-monikered bracelets and badges, bids adieu, and lets us all appreciate how it is when proper royalty comes to town.

• Stuart Bailie