As an actor, Kris Kristofferson was always easy to stumble across. Turn on the telly late on a Saturday night and you often saw him, looking cool in some corny film about truckers or outlaws. As a singer-songwriter, he had to be sought out. Never as famous as his friends Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash, he all but vanished from view in the 1980s, when the country-music establishment frowned on his unpatriotic protest songs.

The fans who have stuck with him are a dedicated lot and at a sold-out Albert Hall they could barely contain their glee. Spellbound whenever Kristofferson sang, they broke ranks on every occasion he stopped to sip from a sports drink, shouting out so many requests that the set could have lasted through the night had the 71-year-old cared to comply. He arrived with his own agenda, however, and stubbornly stuck with it, ignoring the plan to have an interval, dispatching his best-known songs early on and choosing to slip in asides between lines of lyrics rather than stop to talk.

As a performance, it could not have been more intimate. Looking elegant and effortlessly cool in an all-black outfit that contrasted sharply with his white hair and beard, Kristofferson stayed almost rooted to the spot on a small stage with no props or backdrop, armed with an old, acoustic guitar (plus a spare behind him on a stand) and a harmonica on a neck rack. There was a music stand for the set list, although it proved handier as a drinks holder.

The stripped-down delivery suited Kristofferson’s storytelling songs and, for the first hour or so, his poignantly descriptive tales of heartbreak, hangovers and Texan troubles were bewitching enough to ignore that they were delivered in a rumble of a voice with a tone that never varied. Me and Bobby McGee was gorgeous, Best of All Possible Worlds came with comedy pauses and punchline lyrics, plus a dig at the US prison system, and a playful Nobody Wins was compared to the last American election.

In the News, taken from his most recent album, This Old Road, was an antiIraq War track that received one of the night’s loudest cheers and showed that, as a writer, he is still a master craftsman. His voice, however, hasn’t weathered so well and as he ploughed though a second hour, his mumble came close to morose. He should have taken that interval after all.

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