THE moment the moment the curtain went up, Elkie Brooks's band were playing. Drilled by hundreds of gigs, the six-piece male ensemble were a great foil to the diminutive singer's talents.

Wearing impossibly high heels, Brooks, who has just turned 70, dominated the stage with her presence, voice and self-deprecating humour. "I've got 55 lines on my face, one for every year I've been in the business, but once you get to 70 you don't give a s**t," she jokes.

Brooks is a slightly eccentric figure on stage: she raised her arms above her head many times during the show. It was unclear if this was because she treated the whole thing as a workout – she looked like does a lot of exercise – or because she was summoning some guiding musical spirit.

Her voice, though, still works. The gravelly tone is there, but she can fire off some vocal pyrotechnics when she wants to: holding a single high note for 20 seconds brought spontaneous applause from the audience.

The first half was dominated by her 1980s' heyday: the hits Fool If You Think It's Over and Pearl's A Singer and her versions of Nights In White Satin and Gasoline Alley. At times this catalogue was a little too much like revisiting your parents' record collection, although the audience – many of whom were female and over 60 – lapped it up.

The set after the interval was looser and brasher: a section of fantastic rhythm and blues recalled Vinegar Joe, the short-lived but highly infectious band that Brooks shared with Robert Palmer in the early 1970s. A cover of The Doors' Roadhouse Blues was a welcome antidote to the 1980s' synthesised sounds.

An emotional Make You Feel My Love, by Bob Dylan, stood out and Prince's Purple Rain cried out for a strong guitar solo but didn't get it. We were out the door before ten o'clock, but it was hard not to respect somebody who's given her life to music and still going strong.