GRETCHEN Peters doesn't play the Nashville queen. Songwriter to the stars she may be, but when she flew in from Tennessee on Tuesday, she headed for a Pocklington pub quiz.

Wednesday's concert - the first of a belated tour to promote last year's Burnt Toast & Offerings album - was no more formal. Its song order needing a re-think for better changes of pace and mood.

The technical crew worked around her feet after a guitar lead played up in only the second song and, later, in a solitary costume change, designed to send up diva egos, she returned with the sole addition of a feather boa, acquired, or so she said, from a sex shop.

Keyboard player Barry Walsh trumped her by suddenly swapping suit and tie for flip-flops and shorts, but even if Burnt Toast & Offerings is her "divorce album", with happiness suddenly aglow, her best songs still suit darker threads.

England Blues, her hands-on-the-wheel tribute to her love of the North East, was the night's jauntiest yet least convincing number, missing the devastating details of her more troubled vignettes.

Compare that with Breakfast At Our House, the last rites of a marriage where reading replaces conversation, the coffee is cold in her cup and he turns the TV up.

No rhinestones for Gretchen, more wit and grit in hushed arrangements that let her melancholic voice curl around sparse acoustic guitar, Walsh's blues piano and occasional glockenspiel.

When Independence Day tested her top range it was all the more human for that stretch.