Live Review: Cyndi Lauper, Blondie

The names on the bill put this night on a slightly higher plain than the usual string of retro acts wringing the last drops of their career. Unlike many of those nostalgia-fests, you weren't just waiting for that one song. Sure, you wanted Heart Of Glass and Ms Lauper's treatise on the need for girls to enjoy themselves - but each of these have a bunch of other real hits, not just the follow-up single that reached #34 in Portugal.

Then there's the delivery, and what constitutes a legitimate b(r)and line-up — The Undertones without Feargal Sharkey is not the freaking Undertones, for instance — and while you could argue that Debbie Harry's odd mix of old Hollywood glamour and punk sass is Blondie, having creative and life partner Chris Stein — his Warhol-shaded wraith-like presence occasionally energised by what seems like an electrical surge — and the outstanding big beat of original drummer Clem Burke added more truth.

The opening charge of One Way Or Another and Call Me was new wave incarnate, and you could even forgive the often-to-be-dreaded "Here's a track from our new album...", as their status means they get pretty good songs from Johnny Marr, Blood Orange and Charli XCX to be going on with. The 71-year-old Harry can still conjure her pugnacious charisma, even if she now mostly speaks the lyrics rather than sings them. Although, when things got a bit ragged in Rapture there's just a touch of Nanna-getting-lost-on-the-way-to-the-shops vulnerability about her, but it didn't matter much as the crowd were singing their version of the words anyway. Throw in a run at Beastie Boys' Fight For Your Right to up the New York quotient even more, then a howling Atomic, and a final Dreaming — and no memories were really ruined.

If Blondie are The Bowery and black leather jackets, this instalment of Cyndi Lauper is Broadway with some old Nashville, delivered via that familiar Queens nasal drawl. So it's Wanda Jackson's Funnel Of Love and Patsy Cline's Walkin' After Midnight and I Fall To Pieces (on rotating podium, no less) from her recent Detour album, where her rockabilly roots showed.

For all her beautifully corny/ironic interactions with the more flamboyantly enthusiastic of her congregation — "Yes, I love you too, but I don't know you, and you really don't know me..." — you often forget she is a helluva songwriter and singer. The Goonies 'R' Good Enough was more than, and Money Changes Everything was huge: she skipped, danced, rolled on the floor… and didn't miss a note.

She even messed with the big set pieces. Calling out "an old friend who happens to be here", who happened to be Boy George, makes an extended and reggae-fied Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. The event finally got the audience out of their seats — albeit with many trying to capture the moment in their iDevice.

She still had the show-stopping closer up her sleeve. True Colors is the hymn to difference and diversity that America probably really needs. Lauper delivered it solo and plaintive, stopping to raise a fist in solidarity with whomever for whatever, and got the pin-drop silence gesture she deserved. Cyndi Lauper is old school showbiz, and consummate at it.