If this was a review of Ronnie Spector's sunny personality and indomitable spirit, then five stars would hardly be enough. On the comeback trail again, she shrugged off the half-empty venue and the lack of fanfare compared with her previous visits to Britain with soothing words of goodwill and sturdy optimism.

Her name dropping was even more impressive. Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders, Joey Ramone, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel were just some of the people who had lent a helping hand or given her a song at one time or another, and she was eternally grateful to all of them. The only name that she took scrupulous care to avoid mentioning was that of her former husband Phil Spector, the man who turned her group, the Ronettes, into stars of the 1960s, and thereafter did his utmost to destroy her career.

But a five-star story does not in itself make for a great gig, and Spector, 65, was clearly operating in reduced circumstances. Her gleaming smile and magnificent dark bouffant remained intact, but she was suffering from a bad leg and spent much of the show sitting on the drum riser. Her six-person backing band were all capable musicians, but when it came to replicating the Phil Spector productions of classics such as Baby I Love You and Be My Baby the effect was not so much an epic wall of sound as a rather flimsy pub-rock partition.

The biggest disappointment was the ruinous deterioration in Ronnie's voice and her chronic inability to stay in tune. Although songs ranging from vintage doo wop (Please Say You Want Me) to her George Harrison- penned single Try Some, Buy Some were delivered with lashings of extravagant vibrato, her tone and pitching were simply terrible.

She got away with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, a less demanding song, and made a decent fist of the Greenhornes' There is an End, a darker lyric that she conveyed with greater feeling than that applied to the various expressions of young love and yearning elsewhere in the set. However, as she encored with a frightful reprise of I Can Hear Music, the end could not come soon enough.

Tour continues at The Arches, Glasgow, Sep 29

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