Welcome to Billy Thorpe's last recorded performance.

"People have been trying to get me to do solo stuff for years. I just never felt there was anything in it. I couldn't understand why anybody would want to hear Billy Thorpe playing old songs on an acoustic guitar – well, relatively acoustic guitar. There's only 250 or 300,000 watts up here…"

- BILLY THORPE

Welcome to Billy Thorpe's last recorded performance. To call it bittersweet is an understatement. Honest, intimate, exhilarating, poignant, funny as hell; looking back, forward and sideways, it's 110 minutes of pure revelation.

For Billy, this one-off solo show performed at the Basement in Sydney on Saturday, December 16, 2006, distilled his belated realisation that "playing old songs on an acoustic guitar" could capture the essence of his life's work – as well as providing a hushed reception for stunning, previously unheard songs and insightful banter.

For his incredibly fortunate audience on that night – an audience that now includes us – it's a timely insight, through story and song, into one of the most gifted, committed and remarkable performers to stride through this half century of rock'n'roll.

Neither the gig's calibre nor construction were accidental. "I want to deliver something special," Billy wrote to Liberation last June. "This will mark my first Australian solo release in 30 years and my first ever acoustic recording. It's important for many reasons that it's not good but great."

A solid month of isolation in his studio followed. For six hours a day, Billy played and replayed five decades worth of material, searching for a new perspective on what is, by anyone's estimation, a daunting body of work.

What emerges first is his enduring love of '50s rock'n'roll. Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis are mashed into one electrifying boogie-woogie medley. There's the Aztecs' #1 of '64, Poison Ivy, and classic flashbacks in Be Bop A Lula and Oop Poo Pa Doo.

From Stand By Me circa '65 to his signature version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, his uniquely tilted standards are seamlessly matched by some of Thorpie's own, iconic compositons: the raucous rip of Most People I Know; the breezy lilt of Almost Summer.

Then there are the surprises: loans from Joni Mitchell and the Master's Apprentices; a glimpse of his Moroccan recording project under construction, Since You've Been Gone, and a lost demo that positively chills, Girls of Summer:            "Are we all travellers on a road that leads somewhere,

or passengers upon a ship of fools?

It doesn't really matter and I don’t really care

Cause it’s been enough to take this trip with you."

Finally, between the fire and tenderness are the stories that bind them. From baked beans with the Beatles to his life-changing trip to Morocco, Billy the raconteur is in top form. At times, it feels eerily like the last performance of his life. But as every fan knows, Billy brought that kind of energy to every gig.