Ash Grunwald’s blues influences are patently evident in the songs he covers: Robert Johnson’s Crossroads and Willie Dixon’s Spoonful, for example. The Delta’s favourite sons echo loud in Grunwald’s slide guitar playing, but his music is not so easily categorised. Like those of John Butler and Xavier Rudd, Grunwald’s style transcends the blues into something more contemporary. Fused with funk and folk, it’s more akin to the roots sound slowly permeating the mainstream like a faint scent of reefer.

Adelaide song-writer John Woods and his band readied the Governor Hindmarsh crowd with some soulful melodies (including an inspired solo from guest trianglist, Michelle) before calling on “f**kin’ chiller”, Ash Grunwald.

Clearly buoyed by the jubilant reception, Grunwald was soon riding his steel guitar roughshod over one of his trademark rollicking grooves. The energy with which he plays is surely key to his success as a live act, and it is as unrelenting as it is engaging. To play his songs on an electric guitar would be to rob his performance of its vitality and warmth. Rather, he attacks each song with the vigour of a man attempting to contend the Clipsal 500 on a ten-speed bicycle.

By trading in the stomp box on a kick drum linked through various effects pedals, he has introduced a variety of sounds with which to better accompany his big guitar sound. The vintage charm of the steel guitar growled between the resonating booms of a plus-size bass drum, and danced over the tighter tom-tom. But Grunwald is clearly mindful not to succumb to automating his performance.

Following Take the Drop, a song from his new album, Give Signs, Grunwald launched into a turbo-paced version of another, Serious. For Just Be Yourself, we were treated to another steam-train-like ascent from steady roll to furious pace and back again. An a Capella wailer didn’t come off as hoped, but true to his laconic and easygoing character, Grunwald laughed it off and picked up his guitar for Skywriter – an amusing tale of a friend who “borrowed” a sky-writing plane with which to woo his girlfriend.

An extended version of Money was made longer for Grunwald’s fascination with the vocal effect his sound-man had conjured, before leading into I Don’t Believe, from the album of the same name.

He rounded the set by fulfilling his promise to “dolphinate” us. Dolphin Song, a true tale of his rescue by dolphins from a shark attack from 2002’s Introducing…Ash Grunwald, epitomises the charm and humour which radiates from Grunwald on stage. After enrapturing the full room for over an hour and ostensibly ending the show with a dolphin-like “eek-eek” vocal solo, there can’t have been any doubt in Grunwald’s mind that he would be demanded back on stage.

And so keen was he to keep playing that he quite literally walked off, opened a beer and came back on. The crowd’s energy was at its peak; they bounced and clapped as Grunwald strapped on the steel guitar again to deliver the gig’s highlight, Going Out West. Demonstrating the window-rattling capacity of his voice, he bellowed the classic Tom Waits lyric “Well I know karate, Voodoo too, I’m gonna make myself available to you” with a vigour redolent with genuine love for the song – even to the point of announcing the “go-ey off-ey semi-fast bit” of the guitar solo.

To borrow a line from Billy Connolly, if we enjoyed him half as much as he enjoyed us, then he enjoyed us twice as much as we enjoyed him.