Live music review: Grace Jones

The stage is dark and dry ice rises from behind a black curtain like swamp-heat. I'm sitting stage left, just meters away from a stairway that connects Grace Jones' dressing room to her assembled army of fans. The slow clapping - the singer is known to operate on 'Jamaican time' - cranks up to full speed adulation and Grace strolls to centre stage. Dressed in standout Eiko Ishioka, her first outfit looks like a filigree tribute to the painter George Stubbs, form-fitting white bodysuit with equine head-dress and shiny platinum mane. She breaks into song and commands us to pay tribute. This is my third Grace gig in as many years and as ever, she doesn't disappoint.

Cracking through her virtuoso back catalogue and a string of tracks from her most recent release, Hurricane, she harnesses the crowd's energy and mirrors it back to us. I'm so close to her I can see the sweat dripping down her back. Traversing the stage, throwing shapes, she metamorphoses in front of us in more of Ishioka's incarnations. For My Jamaican Guy she wears a cheeky red, gold and green fringed miniskirt, body harness and head-dress and flaunts her Amazonian 58-year-old body with intoxicating self confidence.

So far, so fabulous but in the final moments of Corporate Cannibal, the video backdrop sticks and Grace is incandescent. 'Get it moving guys. Am I being sabotaged or am I being paranoid?' she asks. 'I'd have thought better of the Royal Albert Hall. Good job I'm the only royal person here. Someone is going to get whipped.' From anyone else, this line would grate but Grace has earned her crown.

In her dark brown voice, she throws commentary about her band, her son - the beautiful and brilliant percussionist Paul, her love affair with London, her collaboration with Tricky and other artists; like cake to the starving. She drinks red wine through a straw and jokes about cocaine. She wears a spiky-looking red creation that is part fire, part origami red Bird of Paradise and twirls round to reveal her naked body. The audience erupts. As she teeters up and down the stairs, I spot dressers lacing her costumes and she stands in the darkness, ordering the technicians NOT to light her, so we can enjoy the thrill of the reveal. She's the mother of all singers with a child-like love of dress-up and make believe. But with Grace Jones its more than smoke and mirrors; this is the genuine article.