Dolly Parton - O2 Arena, London 27/06/14

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!” she declares. Judging by the t-shirts at the merch stand with the adage emblazoned in gold lettering along the front, this is something of a catch phrase for her, but it rolls of her tongue with a convincing degree of sincerity. “That’s one of my favourite jokes, but it’s the truest thing I ever said”, she quips easily in her recognisable Tennessean accent. It’s arrestingly charming how simple and open she is; perhaps the key to her success is the amazing degree of accessibility, there’s no hidden meanings to her lyrics she just tells it how it is. She regales how she caught her husband going down to the bank to talk to the tall attractive teller, before she wrote “Jolene”, before going into a note perfect rendition.

“I’m a simple songwriter, and my songs aren’t complicated” she sums up, “but sometimes I like to sing other people’s songs: Dylan, now he’s complicated”. Her two backing singers move to the front of stage to sing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. The harmonies a beautifully arranged, but the performance doesn’t have any of the intensity of the Dylan version that gives it it’s soul. The fact that Parton’s not going for that still makes it a sweet cover and a welcome addition to the set. “I thought I might do a whole album of his songs and call it Dolly Does Dylan” and the room fills with laughter.

She also shows off her skills as a multi-instrumentalist, playing throughout the set banjo, lap steel, guitar, and harmonica. Perhaps the highlight of this is when she asks the crowd if they remember Benny Hill, before playing a high speed rendition of the theme tune on the Saxophone, before joking “with a chest this size I’d have thought I wouldn’t run outta breath so quickly, but I guess it doesn’t work like that”.

It’s striking how simple the production values for the show are; the AV projections seem amazingly naïve for an international arena tour, with the animation for “Nine to Five” just being the large red spinning digits and could have been put together in Word Art, but no one seems to care – all eyes are on Dolly as she easily charms the 15,000 strong crowd. She doesn’t need any help.

Between spinning tales from her childhood growing up in the Smoky Mountains, she plays a fairly even split of songs from the new record and old favourites, but the crowd seems captivated and happy to hang on her every word regardless of whether the songs are old or new, and Parton consistently thanks the crowd for their support, allowing her to live out her childhood dreams of becoming a star.

She ends the show by saying “Now, I can’t sing like Whitney, but this is one of my most famous songs, and I can sing it like me and mean every word”, before singing “I Will Always Love You”, and it certainly seems that she does.