ONE moment can change everything. One comment. One misjudgement.

This time it came without warning at the midway point. Louisiana country blues singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams turned her back on her audience and engaged in a hushed conversation with her Jerry Garcia lookalike roadie as he brought on a glass of red. Up to that point it had been swigs from bottled water, but suddenly something stronger was called for.

Lucinda seemed distracted, apologising, but for what? The sound? Her performance? Nothing was wrong with either. Too late. She had broken the spell and the bond between performer and punters, who sought to reassure her that everything was fine. “We’re English,” reasoned one voice, explaining the quiet but rapt appreciation rather than noisy hollering that greeted each song.

Truly everything was fine, Lucinda, especially Doug Pettibone’s pedal steel guitar on Jackson and Williams’s series of savage yet sage new numbers, such as Something Wicked This Way Comes, but she never recovered from misreading her audience’s mood, an extraordinary own goal with so much experience behind her at 60.

She may prefer rock clubs, but an Intimate Evening means an Intimate Evening, not roistering.

Williams switched to dirty electric guitar, found no comfort in Joy, changed her set list and returned to her alienation theme. The orchestra pit was like “a moat”, she said, leaving her too remote, but that has never been a problem before at the Opera House, and despite her over-sensitivity, her damaged love songs crossed that barrier with their sensual frisson, especially Essence and Drunken Angel.

Either Passionate Kisses or Car Wheels On A Gravel Road would have clawed back lost points but they stayed off limits. Nevertheless, the storm abated, the acoustic guitar returned, and Lucinda touched the magic stone once more with her encore of Nick Drake’s River Man.