John Mayer at the North Shore Events Centre

By REBECCA BARRY

It would be easy to pan John Mayer based on the fact his Grammy-winning first album was called Room For Squares.

Sure, he's a bit preppy, arriving on stage in a pressed, pink-striped shirt with a band you might associate with your high school's jazz group (I was in one once) and partaking in moves your drunk uncle at a wedding might confuse with dancing.

When he plays, his legs twitch as though they're about to give way, his head wobbles on his body like one of those toy dogs in the back of a taxi and his mouth contorts into all sorts of grotesque shapes.

"Gene Simmons I am not," he quips, pretending he's about to flick his guitar pick into the crowd, then handing it sensibly to someone in the first row.

And yet Mayer is surprisingly cool.

He commands the stage the way the former US President might smoke a cigar - a clean-cut momma's boy with dangerous intent.

That huge, husky voice breezes through his two albums-worth of his all-American hits, jollying up the everywoman's dream song, Your Body is A Wonderland with snippets of Prince, and Neon, a la the Beatles.

Then he breaks into the kind of stuff that would make your momma blush.

He really is quite the bluesman, playing the guitar as though it's been strapped to his groin from birth, wringing out the notes until they yelp like a lost puppy, losing himself in countless hedonistic rock'n'roll moments and always taking the audience along for the ride.

"It's not hard to imagine him having sex," remarked someone nearby, which said it all as he fumbled over his instrument daringly close to the edge of the stage. This, Mayer explained later, was just "crazy, ridiculous stuff".

"This," he said of a song he wrote with veteran blues player Buddy Guy, "is the kind of music I want to write more of."

He should, as it was those poignant blues moments, jamming out with his band, that showed what a fantastic musician he really is.

And what a laugh.

"Don't cut your hair above your shoulders," he sings goodbye - a song he must have written about going on tour and leaving a girlfriend behind (maybe the recently bob-haired Jennifer Love-Hewitt?).

A truly passionate musician with a sense of humour, a lack of ego and the balls to wear pink is a rare and wonderful thing. Shirts off to John Mayer.