long time coming

Ironic and all, that title also summed up the feeling of the crowd at last night's Crosby, Stills and Nash concert in Brisbane. Graham Nash joked with the crowd who had kept their tickets from the originally scheduled concert date of February.

The concert itself was an amalgam of powerhouse rock ("For what it's worth" in particular) to the acoustic harmonies that Nash and David Crosby do so well: that said, their voices weren't truly on song until the second half. As a singer, Stills makes a great guitarist and he doesn't look a well man.

But he is a great guitarist and put on a good show, theatrically flipping his hand away from the guitar on the harmonics (and boy were they sweet) and once or twice doing a galumphing hippo walk across the stage - the benefits of wireless guitars and drawbacks of age and size, as he is 62 and a big bloke. And one particularly memorable cross between a gorilla and cormorant - quite bizarre.

But it was a superb night, the sound was great: not too loud and wonderfully clear.

They played all the favourites (as Nash said to the audience at one stage in response to a request, "we'll play all the songs we can fucking remember - all four of them, or two in Crosby's case").

I can't pick out any highlights, it was all highlight.

Hero of the night goes to one of the two blokes next to us. They were fairly pickled by the start time, but each managed an additional four cans of bourbon and coke during the first half. One fellow disappeared, but the other bloke managed a couple more during the second act.

The band got a resounding encore and responded, not surprisingly, first with Teach Your Children and then with Woodstock. Nearly two and half hours - not bad going for a band who've been doing it for 40 years.