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The singer-songwriter who’s hard to categorise but easy to like gave an unusually subdued Town Hall audience a feast of her folk-rock-country repertoire last night.

Shocked is a protest singer and there would have been many who would have wanted to protest at the late start (around 25 minutes) and the strange free-for-all seating upstairs. It was much pleasanter to be standing up downstairs where the seats had all been removed.

Opener Guy Wishart, backed by keyboard player Alan Brown, did his best, but his sound system only made audible the obvious words of his songs – his tunes and guitar playing were good and what you could hear of his voice was fine.

There was no such trouble with Michelle Shocked, who appeared with an excellent fiddle player and guitarist, Wayne Bidwell [sic] from Sydney, after an announced 10-minuted interval stretched to half an hour.

Shocked’s sound system was crystal clear, as was every word she sang and every note she and Bidwell [sic] played.

Shocked performed over 20 songs in her 1 ½ hours on stage, with six from her third album, Swing: Highlights here were “The Cement Lament,” “Silent Ways,” and “God is a Real Estate Developer.”

And her second album, Short Sharp Shocked, got a good airing with seven songs, the best being “When I Grow Up,” “Graffiti Limbo,” and the two she saved for her encore, “Memories of East Texas” and “Anchorage.”

She sent shivers down the spine with an anti-war song about a Vietnam War widow, “The Ballad of Penny Evans,” which she sang unaccompanied.

Shocked is an accomplished performer with excellent songs. She plays great guitar and has a powerful voice.