In the karaoke-literate 21st century millions of people have become unsettlingly comfortable with the idea of singing the songs of other people — usually pretty badly — to an audience that tolerates them because they would rather like to do it too. With this in mind there is something more than a little ironic about the means by which Cat Power first came to wider attention.

In was the songs of other people in her 2000 release, The Covers Record, that propelled Power to wider acclaim, but for those who saw her alchemising tunes such as Wild is the Wind into painful autobiography comfortable was not the word that sprang to mind. Often she would break down on stage — unsure, she now says, of her right to be there. Not so much karaoke as scary-oke.

For those who knew the painful back story it was hard not to consider the return of the Atlanta- raised singer — trumpeting Jukebox, a second covers album — as another small step to closure. But with a drink problem behind her and Chanel and Gap keen to attach her face to their brands, the body language of the woman who strode on stage was different from that of her younger self. That much was apparent within seconds of her first line on Don’t Explain. While her band — an indie supergroup of sorts called The Dirty Delta Blues — dispensed a funereal ghost of a rhythm Power bowed ostentatiously, put down her tea and paced relentlessly about the stage as a brace of white carnations flew past.

Like much of what followed, a deaf person gazing at this spectacle might have had the black-clad centre of attention down as a whimsical practitioner of jaunty cabaret. For those possessed of all of their senses it made for a surreal, sublime sort of sense.

If Power’s two covers projects have excelled at one thing in particular it is her ability to invert and, ultimately, subvert songs that were previously associated with men. Hank Williams’s Ramblin’ Man was recast as a stoned, blue-eyed soul number in the vein of Laura Nyro. New York, New York in the hands of Frank Sinatra, was a song about a city that had been good to him. The version by Power sizes it up like a new man challenged to prove his worth. When she sang it on this occasion she did so in a manner that was part Slinky Malinky, part-Cat In The Hat’s sexy cousin.

Songs from her six self-written albums were no more diminished for the rarefied company she had chosen for them. And none more so than Metal Heart. Here the volcanic sense of release that took hold of band and singer in the final minute of the tune was no less delightful for the fact that it seemed somehow inevitable from the first portentous piano chord. Ten years ago it was a song that she used to perform with her back to the audience.

As she paced from left to right and right to left, eyeballing fans as she did so, it was hard not to conclude that she had travelled an almighty distance. Incalculable in one sense and, over the course of an evening, a good kilometre or two.

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