KEY POINTS:
Growing up, in my mid teens, I had a giant crush on the fiddle player in John Cougar Mellencamp's - as he was known in 1987 - band. She bowed up a storm on the video for Paper In Fire alongside Johnny Cougar and the rest of the
band as they thigh-slapped and hoed-down on the porch of this tumble-down shack.
I thought, perhaps, at John Mellencamp's - as he is known now - show I might finally get to meet her in person. But alas, it was not to be. Still, my crush's replacement fiddles up a storm on that song and many of Mellencamp's other hits, including Check It Out, R.O.C.K. In the USA, Smalltown, and the night's highlight, Jack & Diane, a song that still stands up 26 years on.
But first up, a slick and smiley Sheryl Crow not surprisingly kicked her set off with the dreamy and breezy All I Wanna Do.
She provided a couple of touching moments when she told us Crowded House gave her her first big break, before cracking into a cover of Mean To Me, and before Everday Is A Winding Road, when she revealed the song was inspired by the late Crowded House drummer Paul Hester.
However, she also played what is probably the most awful song the walls of Vector Arena have heard in its short life time with the happy-clappy, Dalai Lama-inspired Out Of Our Hands. Basically, a ghastly, world music-meets-do-gooder, Telethon theme tune.
Elsewhere, she ripped through all her biggest songs from the wending and winding lope of If It Makes You Happy to the Run DMC-sounding There Goes the Neighbourhood.
And then, with the stage expanded and configured into a very cool and punter friendly triangle formation, Mellencamp sloped on looking every bit the musician-meets-mechanic with his short sleeves rolled above his biceps.
He's got quite an ego on him. Not as big as Kanye West, who sang in these hallowed halls a few nights earlier, but Mellencamp rates himself. From beaming himself onto the screens behind the stage alongside Marlon Brando and classic movies like Easy Rider, to picking up the fiddle player so she can straddle him (okay, so maybe I'm just jealous about that one).
Then again, in a career spanning 30-plus years he's had a lot of hits. Though he's no Bruce Springsteen.
But he's also chatty (telling us about playing at the White House for Bill Clinton), with a cheeky sense of humour (joking about how he has dementia), and therefore a bloody likeable bloke.
The mid-show acoustic interlude, with the 57-year-old strumming away on a guitar he's had since he was 18, included Minutes To Memories from his classic 1985 album Scarecrow, with the sound advice of "Suck it up, and tough it out, and be the best you can", inspiring a sing-a-long.
But the singer/songwriter in him took over for too long and even the Mellencamp fan club of young and old ladies in front of us were restless for a dance.
A nice touch at the end was his 13-year-old son Speck joining dad on stage for Authority Song and finale, Hurts So Good, a song which, if the sing-a-long is anything to go by, also still stands the test of time.
But no Cherry Bomb John? There were dozens screaming for it right throughout the almost two hour set. Come on.
