Concert review - Joanne Shaw Taylor at The Robin 2, Bilston

Not even a broken guitar string could wipe the smile off Joanne Shaw Taylor's face as she kicked off her British tour with a "hometown" concert at the Robin 2.

Joanne Shaw Taylor

Robin 2, Bilston

Concert review and photos by Ian Harvey

Not even a broken guitar string could wipe the smile off Joanne Shaw Taylor's face as she kicked off her British tour with a "hometown" concert at the Robin 2.

The Wednesbury-born blues rock singer/guitarist played her first ever gig at the old Robin in Brierley Hill as a teenager and although now based in Detroit she described the new Robin as her "home away from home".

See our concert photo gallery to the right

Although she may namecheck the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan as among her major influences, Shaw Taylor's style also pays homage to Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. If her cover of the former's Manic Depression was nothing short of cataclysmic then her own song Blackest Day invoked the spirit of Led Zeppelin and ended on such a crescendo that the apocalypse might just have been announced.

Shaw Taylor is blessed with not one but two magnificent voices. It's no surprise that she was crowned Female Vocalist Of The Year at the 2010 British Blues Awards (Why just Female Vocalist, was there really a bloke better?) but she also commands her Fender Telecaster with a voice all of her own, total command at her fingertips.

Out to promote her second album, Diamonds In The Dirt, she played a set balanced between that and its predecessor, White Sugar.

Highlights included the soulful title track of Diamonds In The Dirt, surely a song Bonnie Raitt would be proud to cover, the slow-burner Time Has Come and the angular Jump That Train, Shaw Taylor's smoky, husky vocals counterbalanced by the bite of her guitar work.

At one point someone in the audience shouted out "Keep 'em peeled", a reference to the octegenarian Midlands actor Shaw Taylor, whose real-life crime programme Police 5, ran in the 60s and 70s.

That gave Joanne the chance to announce: "I just want to state that I am not related to Shaw Taylor . . . and if I am then my mother's got some explaining to do!"

Earlier, support came from two other muscular blues rock trios, The Tony Adams Band and P-A-U-L, while Shaw Taylor ended her main set with a guitar duel featuring 19-year-old blues hot shot Virgil McMahon from Virgil And The Accelerators.