Emerging alone beneath the vast dome of the Roundhouse in jeans and a plain green shirt, Steve Earle looks like someone who has arrived to fix a washing machine, rather than the man who reclaimed roots rock in the 1980s and cleared the path for the alt-country generation. Earle’s angry 2004 album, The Revolution Starts Now, was a superb example of the Hardcore Troubadour and friends in full country-grunge mode, but here the absence of any accompanists is desperately evident in songs such as The Devil’s Right Hand, as increasingly brutal downstrokes of the guitar struggle to fill a void. In contrast, the gentler, finger-picked numbers, including Earle’s signature song, My Old Friend the Blues, give the Roundhouse the intimate feel of a folk club. Then a large, pear-shaped man in black arrives, portending doom, to provide programmed beats for selections from last year’s Washington Square Serenade album. Earle decamped to New York to walk the streets that shaped the 1960s protest singers, and tonight we’re treated to a cut-and-paste Big Apple of downtown A-trains, Alphabet City and Seventh Avenue, over a budget backdrop that sounds like a 1992 trip-hop version of the Steve Earle sound. In the now restless standing area before the stage, even elderly Uncut magazine subscribers recognise this hybrid as an ill-advised experiment.

We should admire an established artist such as Earle for challenging his audience 30 years into his career, but only an unaugmented Sparkle and Shine really sparkled and shone. Even Earle’s wife and opening act, Allison Moorer, looked shifty during her vocal contributions to the latin-flavoured, genre-crossing City of Immigrants. Earle was alone again for a closing run of crowd pleasers, but the room had already thinned around the edges when he took up the mandolin for a beautiful version of The Galway Girl, reminding us what he’s capable of.

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