Midway through a desolate cover of the mining lament Dark As a Dungeon – made famous by Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison – Josh Homme stops dead, distracted by a man in the front row leaving. "You got somewhere to be, man?" he berates. "Yeah, your first three albums were the best too, asshole."
Most festival hall crowds would gasp at such a crack in the reverence, this one howls with laughter. It's a night, you see, not to be taken too seriously. When many hard rockers decide to try their songs out acoustically – to prove their song-writing worth or rest their battered cochlea – it often marks a Rubicon of maturity, the day the rock dies. Not Homme; as frontman of Queens of the Stone Age he's a purveyor of riffs that hammer like a meteorite storm and desert psychedelics that swarm like a peyote hit. He holds no truck with hushed appreciation. When he appears on stage besuited, swigging from a glass of red wine and backlit from a single yellowed light for that 3am bar-room effect, to announce that he's only playing this one-off acoustic show for James Lavelle's Meltdown festival because "he lent me a lot of money in an exotic dancing place and it didn't go well," it's clear we're in for a night of brusque cabaret bonhomie that invites catcalls and communal looseness.
Homme fields good-natured heckles galore, pauses during Dean Martin's Memories Are Made of This to tackle a persistent balcony bawler – "Someone get that woman a drink so she'll close her mouth" – and debuts a 20s flapper-style song called Villains of Circumstance "that I made up about 30 minutes ago" yet sounds remarkably tuned and refined. Between the bon viveur repartee and sophisticated covers – Marty Wilde's vaudevillian Bad Boy is a standout – Homme's own songs gleam with 10 inches of stoner rock grit chiselled off. Kalopsia becomes beautifully muslin-thin, while Long Slow Goodbye is exposed as a rich soul song, Homme's opulent swampland baritone and impassioned falsettos channelling the whisky pains of the Mississippi bluesmen.
When he's joined by Mark Lanegan and QOTSA guitarist and "huge alcoholic" Troy Van Leeuwen, both in suits, it starts to look like a court hearing for recovering drug addicts, but sounds ever more sublime. Lanegan croons a prickly Hanging Tree and Leeuwen adds "bleeping bullshit" electronics to a sparse, tense I Never Came. By the time Homme takes to the grand piano for his near-death torch song The Vampyre of Time and Memory, he's gulping wine, slurring drunk philosophies like The Fast Show's Rowley Birkin QC and somehow enhancing his rock'n'roll credentials through a medium designed to crush them.
