Courtney Love has returned. And judging by her performance last night at Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom, the woman unfairly viewed as the greatest rock villainess since Yoko Ono is finally beginning to mellow.

Of course, calming down on the Courtney Love scale is still pretty loopy by anyone else’s criteria. The twenty songs she and her all-male band unleashed on an adoring crowd were interspersed with a regular series of eccentricities that from any other celebrity musician would almost certainly be viewed as imminent career meltdown.

In Pictures: Courtney Love roars into Vancouver

“Can I have a tiny shot of tequila?” she asked her beleaguered roadie, TJ, after a blistering opening of “Plump” and “Skinny Little Bitch”. To the untrained eye, it appeared that she’d been enjoying more than a few shots before swaying onto the stage; greeting her fans with a lit cigarette and a bunch of roses that she proceeded to hurl into the crowd one by one.

The rose distribution punctuated almost every song during the first half the show.

“Who was the meanest bitch today?” she asked, eager to ensure that the last bloom went to the most deserving recipient, before going on to explain why she was using a teleprompter, allegedly stolen from Guns ’n Roses’ Axl Rose.

“It’s not like I forget the lyrics,” she smiled. “I forget the chords and the lyrics. Yes, Granny needs a teleprompter!”

When Love wasn’t being odd, she was also unleashing furious takes on her own back catalogue. A distinctly unFleetwood Mac-ish “Gold Dust Woman” was followed by a version of “Violet” that echoed the intensity of the original recording nearly 20 years earlier. “Malibu” and “Asking For It” were both lapped up by a steadily growing moshpit, before the highlights of the night arrived with the hardcore-tinged “Jennifer’s Body” and the polished rock of “Celebrity Skin”.

Love still has a flamethrower of a voice, indiscriminately scorching notes that cross its path. Passion and delivery, not accuracy, have always been her vocal trademarks. Even so, fatigue appeared to have caught up with her midway through “Reasons To Be Beautiful,” when her roar began to disintegrate into a croak, but she found a second wind to fire her way through set closer “Miss World”.

“Catch us while we’re still cool and it’s 1990,” she grinned, aware that her voice was showing its age. “That was a joke you f***ers!”

The aforementioned mellowness revealed itself during an acoustic encore of “Petals,” “Dying” and “Northern Star” that still crackled with rawness if not volume. The rest of the band wandered back on stage, and after Love threatened a few lines of Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”, they launched into a scorching rendition of “Doll Parts,” adding a few extra sprinkles of controversy dust on proceedings with a couple of verses from Patti Smith’s “Rock n Roll N*gger” at its coda.

There have been wilder evenings at the Commodore, but for a combination of songs, voice, attitude and old-fashioned celebrity nuttiness, the 49-year old Courtney Love still takes some beating. What a rock star!