IT was standing-room only for the opening Big Big Country concert and not much room to stand. Not quite the 10,000,000 pairs of hands and throats we sounded like from the stage, apparently, but if Suzy Bogguss' imagination can run to polymultiplication it can also zoom downwards as she turned the Fruitmarket into a steamie.

News of her baby son's on-tour sleeping patterns. The scarifying experience of singing a Buck Owens song when Mr O is but 8ft away. The joys of living in Centennial, Wyoming, population 50, 49 of them men. All these and more she shared with us in her chinwags.

Whaddya mean, I'm forgetting about the music? Sometimes, it seemed liked she'd forgotten about the music. Sometimes, alas, the music was indeed forgettable. It's never less than palatable but the early portion, including that old Judy Collins warhorse Someday Soon, was rapidly heading up a bland alley until Bogguss had the bright idea to let her highly efficient band take five and go back to her solo acoustic roots with the aforementioned Buck Owens song, a frankly heartfelt Together Again, and a cowboy campfire ballad, complete with impressive yodelling.

This all-too-short interlude, which Bogguss herself enjoyed so much that she had her guys repeat a particularly fine vocal harmony, turned the concert around and thereafter she pealed off layer after stylistic layer of her eclectic song choice. Spooky blues. Stomping Nashville bar music. A rip-roaring Louisiana Hayride. Her voice always beautifully controlled and her audience with her all the way, although it was pity about the Elton John cover.