kd lang: Waterfront Hall, Belfast (0870 243 4455), tonight; Olympia, Dublin (0818 719 330), Monday. “I appreciate the beaver,” she says on sauntering back out for her last encore. Lang’s good at the impromptu patter, but even she looks momentarily startled by this hurtling symbol – not only of her native land but so much more. As a stunt, it upstages even the “kd! come to Spain!” banner draped along the theatre’s balcony like wistful bunting.

Some heart-throbs get knickers thrown at them: lang gets a large toy beaver. In musical terms, lang’s ability to communicate transcends, rather than reinforces, differences.She’s different in one way, however. There was a brief period when all the fluff about lang’s sexuality seemed more important than her music, and while she’s to be applauded for having the guts to come out, a talent for lesbianism alone is no reason for fame. “That’s why,” she explains.Even “Miss Chatelaine”, the exuberantly camp song from 1992’s breakthrough album, Ing?e, gets a subtle rewrite – “They call me Mr Chatelaine.Whether or not lang’s been spending lonely tour nights with Judith Butler propped on her breast, she’s not saying, but this gleeful nod towards the gender theorists elicits squeals of delight And that’s just the men in the house.It’s nicely done.

Placing a smooch of a smacker on the lips of her bass player, the impressively bearded David Piltch, lang pulls away, rubbing her cheek. There are plenty of tongue-in-cheek references to her off-stage life. She’s a graceful mover, but she delights in sending herself up. She rumba’s around the stage, executes flat-footed jumps and, then to confound everything, completes the sequence with a perfectly timed dip – one that would have pleased Elvis himself – to catch a deliberately dropped microphone stand.