Joan Jett and the Blackhearts at 100 Club, review
Andrew Perry hails the return of the rock and roll heroine. Rating: * * *

Published: 11:30AM BST 16 Jun 2010

Rock and roll history, even after more than 50 years, is not littered with many heroines. Joan Jett, as is stirringly demonstrated in a new Hollywood film about her rise to fame in the mid-Seventies as leader of the Runaways, is definitely one of them. As a teenager, she worshipped the leather-clad glam singer Suzi Quatro and soon achieved comparable success, reaching her peak with 1981’s gloriously uncomplicated solo hit, I Love Rock’n’Roll.

Though Jett has cut few records in the past two decades, she ostensibly now trades on her singularity as a beloved – and convincing – female rocker, even being hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 guitarists of all time. In advance of a European stadium tour supporting Green Day, here was a rare chance to see Jett play a full, headline set at close quarters.

“Wow, it’s tight and sweaty in here, just how I like it,” she beamed, after rollicking versions of Bad Reputation and the Runaways hit Cherry Bomb. Beneath her straggly black hair, Jett, now 51, churned out riffs in evident thrall to Keith Richards – her other key role model. Though she has latterly been embraced by the tattoos-and-piercings US punk scene, Jett’s music harked back to a kind of pre-punk innocence.

By contrast with her other spiky-haired band members, her keyboard player, Kenny Laguna, resembled an admonishing grandfather from a Woody Allen movie. It was Laguna, a Brill Building veteran, who masterminded Jett’s career after the Runaways imploded, and his old showbusiness values, far from being fuddy-duddyish, made Jett’s act feel unique, coy and alluring by post-millennial standards.

During a straight-up reading of the glam classic Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah), Jett winked and smiled coquettishly at her female admirers in the front rows, eliciting whoops of pleasure. The singer is a gay icon, and various romantic scenes in the Runaways movie have finally confirmed her own sexuality in that direction. A number of her songs (Androgynous, Not Ashamed, AC/DC etc) alluded to gender issues, but through suggestion – an art long since steamrollered aside by tell-all female artists such as Courtney Love and Lily Allen.

As she led the charge into a singalong of I Love Rock’n’Roll, which has been her calling card for almost 30 years, Jett denied her fans not a milligram of the simple, unthreatening pleasure the song can bring, emitting a series of fabulous yowls. She was a sound performer, a hearty singer, and she had a vital quality, which we rarely associate with rock – decorum.