ROCK / Meanwhile, back on the road to stardom . . .

HAIL Counting Crows, the new everybody by all accounts. The new REM, the new Eagles, the new Band, the new Gram Parsons, the new Springsteen . . . Plundering history has never been a sin in rock music; even the great records are stuffed full of allusions and echoes. The trick is to be more than the sum of the influences.

For their record company, Geffen, these San Franciscans are the new Nirvana - their debut album, August and Everything After, is shifting 100,000 copies a week in the States, the label's best-seller since Nevermind. Which explains the patent amusement of Adam Duritz, the lead singer, at the size of the Borderline. Its low ceilings and Wild West fittings lent a privileged intimacy to their British debut. From now on, halls and stadia will be the band's natural habitat.

They opened with two new songs, both as good as anything on August. 'Elizabeth' is slow and passionate, 'Children in Bloom' a rock work-out with a big, noisy guitar break and even a curlicue of feedback, unlike anything on the album. When they went into 'Round Here', the album's opener, the theme continued: this was electric, not acoustic, rock. More feedback, wah-wah distortions, an almost ecstatic climax. 'Time and Time Again' flowed like a wide, wide river, slow but powerful, and again much noisier than anything on the album.

It was odd to see material like this delivered by a man in dreadlocks. Duritz flings himself round like a rap artist, and he has all the right gestures. But there was not a dance beat in sight, just the trenchant sound of the five-piece band underpinning his Michael Stipe-like voice, which loses much of its delicacy live, though he piles on the passion to compensate.

Which was true of the gig as a whole: subtlety traded in for driving energy. When they ended with 'A Murder of One', the hard edges coalesced and a gentle song was transformed into a triumphant rocker. Counting Crows have lots of good songs. But to make the leap from hot new things to rock immortals, they will have to come up with a few all-out classics. And when they make a noise that could only be theirs, they really will have arrived.

Kris Kristofferson arrived in 1970, and has been going away and coming back ever since. His muse has been led astray over the years by a combination of movie-stardom and a sometime habit of two bottles of whisky a day. But, let's face it, for a man singing about pain and regret, this is almost required living.

The Mean Fiddler seemed on the small side for a grizzled icon like Kristofferson. But he appeared blissfully unconcerned, performing the two- hour set with a huge grin that was mirrored by most of the audience. And what an audience. Never can the Mean Fiddler have played host to so many screaming matrons.

'Help Me Make It Through the Night', the first song up, went straight for the recognition jugular, though the arrangement was dubious. The rigidities of the drum section on Danny Toomis's keyboard gave it a stiff-necked quality, disturbingly like a pub gig. On 'Me and Bobby McGee', though, the boxy percussion was effective in an odd way, giving it a garage-acoustic feel, like something from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

Toomis's lead vocals on a couple of songs almost upstaged his boss's, even if they lacked the imprint of excess stamped on Kristofferson's voice. But the instrumental embellishments became increasingly dodgy, and the synthesised strings on 'The Promise' were truly horrible.

The matrons loved it, though, and an encore reprise of 'Me and Bobby McGee' was like a cross between a carnival and sacred ritual. Homage to a high priest.

Counting Crows: Forum, NW5, 071-284 2200, 22 April.