Kiefer Sutherland @ Gorilla, Manchester, 26 Jun

Rarely does an A-List actor pass this way, and especially one who’s been clandestinely writing his own songs for a few years without playing them publicly. Despite his low-key Glastonbury appearance the previous day, Kiefer’s still so far under the music radar that his own Wiki entry barely acknowledges his ‘music career’, even though he’s had an album out for over a year.

That doesn’t stop his fans turning out in force to a sold out Gorilla hosting the Rainy City version of the Not Enough Whiskey in Europe tour. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but what they get is a set of two halves: the first one intriguing, the second mind blowing.

Supporting act Sound of the Sirens is a female guitar folk-rocking duo from Devon who fall somewhere between Dixie Chicks without the political baggage and Manchester’s own Taylor and the Mason. Coming straight from Glastonbury and ‘skanking’ because of it they deliver up an opening set of melodic and thoughtful songs, touching on serious subjects such as mental health issues and ‘sticking together’ which obviously goes down well with a Manchester audience. Most of them build up slowly to a bass drum kicking crescendo. While a little variety might not go amiss they easily win over an excited audience and could have played on for a while longer without complaint, even with Kiefer and his gang waiting in the wings.

He arrives on stage wearing a huge fedora-style hat that could have been a flying saucer in a 1950s B-Movie set around Roswell, with a backing band of two guitars, bass and drums. It isn’t long before he wins the audience over with a few well-chosen and heartfelt words about the recent terrorist attack here and ‘personal loss’ in general and dedicates Truth in Your Eyes to the city.

The opening songs are in the main slow country/rock/Americana affairs. It’s not hard to imagine you’re in a lounge somewhere on Sunset Boulevard on a Sunday afternoon rather than under a railway arch in downtown Manchester on a grey Monday evening.

While he chats with an actor’s effortless ease between songs, Kiefer hasn’t got the best singing voice in the world; it’s deep and raspy and his range is limited. Several times he sounds like he needs some more whiskey and on more than one occasion those songs are saved by the guitar flair of Michael Gurley to his right. But there’s honesty and emotion in spades and it’s clear he means it when he says, “I am experiencing great joy now being able to play these songs to a live audience”.

The set changes in nature from the sixth song, Shirley Jean, which was inspired by Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. The pace starts to step up. The first cover of the evening, Merle Haggard’s The Bottle Let Me Down, is followed by a song that will be on his next album, Saskatchewan, an ode to the Canadian province that was home to his maternal grandfather Tommy Douglas, who was its premier and who is acknowledged as having brought universal healthcare to the country.

There then follows an extraordinary sequence of two rock songs, his own Ways To Be Wicked and Tom Petty’s Honey Bee, and what can only be described as an experimental one, All She Wrote. The stage comes to life as Gurley and Austin Valleijo launch into an epic guitar duel throughout the first two with Sutherland rocking along with them. They’re so hot that if they were going to cover Petty you feel they could have handled American Girl with ease. That really would have been something.

Then, during All She Wrote, which Sutherland says he “wrote feeling chilled but it came out scary,” the stage fittingly turns blood red as he intones, "let me tell you a story from the marrow of my bones.”

After that trilogy Down in a Hole is something of an anticlimax but the band very quickly emerges to cries of “Kiefer! Kiefer!” for a four-song encore that includes what is surely the highlight of the evening, an absolutely wonderful rendition of Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door that brings the house down.

By now it looks as if Kiefer doesn’t want to leave the stage and it’s impossible not to believe he relishes every word when he says repeatedly, “I’ll never forget this night!”