If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio balladry, that somehow works best, and perhaps only, on those endless highways and dusty plains.
Tonight she imports that spirit – the best of America at a time when the world is seeing the worst of it – to a 200-year-old hall full of septuagenarians on the British south coast.
Raitt plays for an hour-and-a-half and has real presence, a gregarious chatty ease that’s both funny and affectionate, the gift of being genuinely “there” in front of 1700 people. She’s petite and lithe, her signature hair bright red with a white streak, wearing a metallic aquamarine blouse and black rock’n’roll pantaloons. Her backdrop is simple yet surprisingly effective, a tree-lined lake beneath a hazy sun, its mood changing, dependent on the lighting. She opens with the down-home boogie of “Split Decision” from 2012. And we’re off.
Full disclosure; when my partner said she was interested in seeing Bonnie Raitt. I was, like, “What!?!, Why!?!”. I associated her with middle-of-the-road country-rock-lite blandness. This, of course, is because she achieved global fame with a string of slick multi-million selling albums in the early 1990s, starting with her biggest of all, 1989’s Nick of Time (from which she, naturally plays a few numbers tonight, including John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love” and ultra-Eighties slowie “Too Soon to Tell”). But my partner then introduced me to her raw blues side, the songs from her ten-year career before fame and, indeed, her regular trips down that road since. This was a Bonnie Raitt I didn’t know and hadn’t bothered to explore. It was a happy discovery.
In that vein, for this listener, the highlights of her set include Little Willie John’s “Need Your Love so Bad”, a fantastic take on Sippie Wallace’s “Women Be Wise” (itself a reversion of the 1920s blues “Don’t Advertise Your Man”), her own riffin’ blues-rock, “Livin’ for the Ones”, an ode to living your best life in honour of contemporaries being picked off by the reaper, and an encore-closing, raucous rock’n’roll guitar jam on BB King’s “Never Make Your Move Too Soon”. The latter included support act Jon Cleary, a New Orleans-based Brit who’s worked with everyone from Taj Mahal to Eric Clapton. He reappeared repeatedly during Raitt’s set, even playing one of his own songs, “Unnecessarily Mercenary”, with her.
The rest of her band are impressive too; Ricky Fataar, who’s drummed with everyone from The Beach Boys to The Rutles, bassist Hutch Hutchinson, who’s played with her for 42 years, after being introduced by Rolling Stones keys-man Ian McLagen, Canadian keys-player Glenn Patscha, Duke Levine on guitar, and a percussionist whose name I didn’t catch (Matt Bates?).
Sometimes, though, Raitt pared things back to just a spotlight and an acoustic guitar or piano, giving us John Prine numbers, Richard Thompson’s “Dimming of the Day” and others. Whether she’s emoting soulfully or making Annie Lennox’s “Little Bird” sound like an early-Seventies Who cut with her group, there’s a sense this is a band who play together rather than just play together. By that I mean that where so many bands in 2025 are nailed to tech considerations, playing the same songs in the same order each night, Raitt creates a new set-list every concert, throwing in covers, deep cuts and curveballs for the sheer joy of it.
And she seems so alive. The Dome is all seated tonight and the only couple who get up and dance are soon made to sit down. This is fair enough as they’re blocking someone’s view, but also sort of sad. Raitt deserves some boogie-ing. She’s fine with it, though, a genial raconteur, whether stating “I can’t believe pot is illegal in England?” and doing an impression of a stoned fan, or slyly bemoaning the state of the States, or telling us she was tickled to meet the real Sheriff of Nottingham the other night. She’s generous, to us and to her band. Not all the set is for me – some really not! – but the best of it is riven with raw spirit, turbo-amped by her extraordinary fret-wrangling abilities. It’s just another concert on her long tour, but it felt like something one-off and special. Which is rarer than it might be.
Below: watch an hour-long performance by Bonnie Raitt on the Austin City Limits TV show
