All Saints

Mel Blatt, Shaznay Lewis, Natalie and Nicole Appleton ended their ten-date tour of the UK last night with an emotional performance at the Nick Raynes LCR, now able to put the rows and the tabloid headlines behind them and share the love with a crowd made up largely of loose-limbed thirty somethings still prepared to work those slouchy dance moves and sing back every word of their hit songs. Yes, All Saints were making a Bootie Call to Norwich, eighteen years after the song reached top spot in the UK Top 40. Bring it on, bring it bring it on now.

The show started early. Young Scandinavian electro-popster Hanne Leland was on stage at 7.00pm, a time when many of tonight's audience were still negotiating the traffic on Norwich's busy Earlham Road. She was left to perform her set to a half-empty auditorium, and never really got into her stride. Her shift from Nashville-inspired country to European electro-pop is intriguing. She has a lovely voice (echoes of Dolly Parton), but it is really better suited to a Taylor Swift pop progression rather than jumping on the Urban-Cosmo bandwagon favoured by Iggy Azalea and Grimes. Looking slightly awkward in baseball jacket and tracky bottoms she paced the stage, rather like a caged animal pining for the fjords of her native Norway.

A DJ set by All Saints producer, and co-writer of many of their biggest hits, K-Gee keeps the crowd entertained. 'Anyone in tonight from the Thirty-Plus Crew?' he calls, and plenty of hands go up in the air. It turns out his mum lives in Cromer, and he has been over to see her today, as well as calling in on Sheringham and Great Yarmouth. Another North Norfolk legend that we can claim as one of us.

All Saints arrive on stage to a euphoric welcome, and kick off with I Know Where It's At from the debut album. They work their way through a one hour set that includes seven songs from the excellent Red Flag album, but never ignores the crowd-pleasing hits either. Lady Marmalade is re-worked to include sections from Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 hit Push It, in recognition of all the female acts that were genuinely promoting Girl Power at around that time. Their is an acoustic medley of solo hits, starting with Mel's Twenty Four Seven and including Shaznay's Never Felt Like This Before and the Appleton sister's Don't Worry. But it is the sing-it-back biggies like Black Coffee, War of Nerves, and of course Bootie Call that get the biggest cheers.

Mel forgets the words to Under The Bridge (“It's the last night of the tour. My brain is fucked!”), but it doesn't matter. The audience hold white paper hearts aloft for the final song, Never Ever, before the the band depart the stage. The encore is a rendition of the recent single, the upbeat and cathartic One Strike, followed, as could only be the case, with a massed rendition from both stage and floor of those magical Pure Shores.

It's been emotional, as Vinnie Jones once said. The band were tight, if rather loud, and the radio mikes were a touch sensitive at times, leading to some vocal distortion, but the whole evening was about memories and shared love. The forty year old All Saints mums have clearly loved every minute of being back together again and performing live. OK, the dance moves were endearingly under-rehearsed when held up against a Britney gig, and the odd lyric was fluffed or forgotten, but did we care? Did we bollocks. We were all in All Saints heaven.