By the time Joni Mitchell released her eleventh studio album, Wild Things Run Fast, in 1983, she’d sped her own way through a career marked by continual artistic evolution, with albums such as Ladies Of The Canyon, the game-changing Blue and the jazz-led Hejira reshaping all notions of singer-songwriter music – and of what Mitchell herself was capable of. With Wild Things Run Fast, she expanded her music even further, drawing on 80s synth-pop for a record that went Top 30 in both the US and her Canadian homeland. Originally recorded for broadcast on FM radio, this concert, captured before a sold-out audience during the first of two shows that Mitchell performed at the Sydney Opera House in March 1983, finds Mitchell at the top of her game. Alongside a laidback arrangement of her hit US single You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio and a cheerfully freewheeling take on the iconic ecological anthem Big Yellow Taxi, she performs highlights from Wild Things Run Fast, including a rock-edged Underneath The Streetlight and the poignant masterpiece that is Chinese Café, the latter’s emotive underpinning given even greater impact through its use of snatches of The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody. Unfettered and free, this is Mitchell at her most masterful.