All exceptional concerts share a pivotal moment that conveniently blows away all the detritus and immediately brings the big picture into focus.

At last night's stunning P.J. Harvey show, held at a very sold-out Phoenix, that moment came four songs and 15 minutes in. As her remarkably elastic new five-piece band kicked into Working For The Man, one of the more abrasive moments on her recent To Bring You My Love album, five spotlights switched on and began a highly kinetic search of the stage.

In a deft bit of choreography, Harvey - decked out in a shiny green dress that clung to her body like a frightened child - spent the entire song bobbing in and out of the intersecting beams, gleefully singing lines like "Don't you know yet who I am?", and never once letting the light catch her.

More than anything else, the extroverted dynamo we saw last night was a product of Harvey's deliberate decision to "stage" a performance.

Each of the 16 songs came off as a little self-contained play, from the lighting, to Harvey's stylized hand movements, to the way, say, the back curtain billowed, wave-like, during Down By The Water.

The result was weirdly schizophrenic: It made the evening unlike any club show in recent memory, but it also tossed up an invisible wall between Harvey and the audience (none of whom seemed to mind in the least, it should be noted).

While she put on undeniably powerful performances while acting out songs such as Legs, Teclo and especially the double encore of I Think I'm A Mother and Long Snake Moan, you rarely got the sense she was truly getting lost in her material.

Granted, it's unfair - not to mention dangerous - to expect a performer to spill her guts on stage night after night. But because Harvey's songs are so raw and visceral, it also makes it kind of a disappointment she didn't.

That reservation aside, however, this will easily go down as one of the most imaginative and potent concerts of 1995.

Meanwhile, opening up the evening was the most adventurous act to emerge from the so-called "trip hop" scene of Bristol, England. Adrian Thaws, a.k.a. Tricky, got off to a wobbly start, but the audience simply wouldn't let him fail.

At the mercy of a temperamental sound system, much of the music that sounded intricate and eccentric on album came out as sonic mush on stage.

But Tricky and his enigmatic 20-year-old singer, Martina, finally hit their stride on the foul-mouthed Abbaon Fat Tracks, and their set-closing remake of Public Enemy's Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos was good enough to earn them an encore.

No small feat, considering what was to follow.

SUN RATING: 4 OUT OF 5