Some artists need flash bombs to make an impression on stage. Some need giant screens. Some need to run around like hyperactive toddlers. All Grace Jones needed was a hula hoop – not the delicious potato snack, but the plastic ring. For the ten minutes or so of ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ that ended her set on a balmy evening in the courtyard of Hampton Court Palace, she languidly rotated the ring around her hips, all while she strode across the stage, then climbed a set of stairs. Not a single revolution was missed. I realise that you don’t come to these pages for reviews of hula hooping, but by God, it was astonishing. I like to think it was what Henry VIII would have wanted.

It was a fitting end to a brilliantly unhinged show. She had a different piece of extravagant headwear for each song; her patter was ludicrous: even after she and her band had left the stage, she was still talking into the mic, unseen, as the crowd filed out: ‘Go home now! Go home and fuck each other!’ The insanity was a delight, but it didn’t overshadow the main event – the music.

If Jones is best known as a face and a body – Amazonian, imposing, a Bond villain’s henchwoman – never forget the extraordinary records she has made. From the opening ‘Nightclubbing’ – Jones appearing in a mask atop the backline that made her look a little like a supermodel Sauron – her band created a luscious, luxuriant background for her. Even 40 or more years on, the music sounded so modern. Mixing genres is commonplace now, but Jones’s albums for Island in the 1970s and ’80s mixed reggae and funk and art-rock so fluidly, and in such a skew-whiff way, that they created something quite new. ‘La vie en rose’, especially, still sounded astonishing.

If there’s a comparison – not musically, but in terms of mood – it might be late Roxy Music. There’s that same feeling of opulent ennui: of a party that you can’t leave but you don’t know if you want to stay. It was encapsulated in her cover of Chrissie Hynde’s ‘Private Life’: ‘Your sex life complications are not my fascinations.’

Jones is 75 now, but if you’d asked me to guess her age, I’d have taken 40 years off that. Her voice is fantastic (good enough to tackle a gospel version of ‘Amazing Grace’ with aplomb), her figure is incredible, and her charisma is undiminished. And to sit in one of the most beautiful places in England watching her at work was a delight. The Hampton Court Palace shows that take place every year aren’t cheap – up to a hundred quid a ticket – but if you can face forking out you can make an evening of it (inevitably, you can pre-book picnics to eat in the grounds).

I had also loved every minute of the American singer-songwriter Kevin Morby the previous night, but it seemed a bit tame after seeing Jones – like having a fantastic starter only to forget it immediately when a perfect main course arrives.

Morby has released eight solo albums, gradually building an audience – the Roundhouse, he said, was his biggest show yet – by doing simple things very well. Like Jones, he makes music that is timeless, but not because it sounds modern: he could have been working in 1973, or 1983, or 1993, or … you get the picture. It’s that strand of Americana that draws on Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, country music, and holds an incredible romantic appeal for those of us who grew up dreaming about the other side of the Atlantic. Who could resist a song entitled ‘Bittersweet, TN’? Oh God, yes! Take me there! Take me to two-lane blacktops and strip malls and juke joints and girls in Daisy Dukes.

That’s one of the curious differences between Britain and America: there isn’t the same continuum in British rock. Yes, there are genre revivalists. Yes, there are people inspired by the past. But there’s no distinctively British style of rock or pop that has flowed, barely altered, across more than half a century. Much as I would love it if there were always a couple of dozen bands who sounded like the Sweet or Slade, it’s just not the case.

This stuff can be deadly dull, no matter how sympathetic you might be, but Morby also has an expert band, and knows how to arrange his songs with shade. It put me in mind of Clarence Clemons complaining that Springsteen had all but excised his sax from ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’. When you did hear it, however, Springsteen noted, it had double the impact.

Right, time for me to check property prices in Bittersweet, TN.