Star rating: **** An hour in, Hayes Carll decides that his audience is being too polite, so he turns director and suggests that a guy stage-right make an improper suggestion to the bloke next to him's wife. Somebody else should pour a beer over someone's head and everyone's invited to yell at will: "Play Freebird."

Star rating: ****

An hour in, Hayes Carll decides that his audience is being too polite, so he turns director and suggests that a guy stage-right make an improper suggestion to the bloke next to him's wife. Somebody else should pour a beer over someone's head and everyone's invited to yell at will: "Play Freebird."

This is all so that Carll and his two-man orchestra will feel more at home, although up to this point they've done a terrific job, as the best Texan troubadours do, of making the venue we're in feel like it's been transported into the Americana heartlands.

If the audience is attentive, that's because Carll's words are worth hanging on to, whether they're the true-to-life tales that he packages with a direct melodic sensibility and a rough-as- Sunday-morning vocal tone or part of the dry, knowing wit that comes in between the songs.

Sometimes the wit, the authenticity, the voice and a damn fine tune all come together, as in Good Friends' apparently near factual update of Carll's high-school class. Sometimes the result's agreeably daft - try Chickens with its breeding for the plate practicality and Scott Davis's wop-op-a-wop guitar lines. Other examples are quite simply classy, swinging rockabilly, with Davis and dobro player Travis Linville trading apposite mandolin and slide licks between Carll's potent verses.

The piece de resistance for now is She Left Me for Jesus, as clever a tale of faux-dumbness as has ever been penned and the song Carll should play on Jools Holland's TV show this week, if he really does want to provoke a career-enhancing tabloid headline-grabbing spat with some of his more gullible co-stars.