“And you complete the heart of me,” she continued, her hands now pounding her chest, “Our love is all we need …”

It’s been a while since I’ve seen someone so committed to acting out her own lyrics as Carlisle tonight. At one point on this evening’s opening song, Runaway Horses I swear she even pretends to be holding a horse’s reins and trotting. It’s really rather sweet.

And maybe it’s a sign that the singer is enjoying herself. Carlisle’s appearance at Radio 2 in the Park at the weekend had prompted the odd grumble about her vocals and her attitude on social media, but this gig found her fully committed and in fine, full voice. If anything, at times that voice even threatened to overpower her backing band.

Carlisle, now 67, jumped and bounced and sashayed barefoot across the stage all evening, never dropping a note, thrilling a clearly devoted Edinburgh audience, while her unshowy, anonymous musicians – we only ever learn their first names – backed her up impeccably.

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The singer’s current tour is entitled “Heavenly Hits” and the contents matched the label. This 90-minute set concentrated on a solo career that garnered 19 top 40 singles in the 1980s and 1990s (seven of them made it into the top 10 and Heaven is a Place on Earth famously reached the number one spot).

After her punk beginnings in The Germs and her beat group breakthrough with The Go-Gos, Carlisle’s subsequent solo career majored on glossy AOR and tonight’s performance matched the sheen of the records she became famous for.

This was a slick, polished, impressive performance. But there did feel something missing in its very smoothness. Carlisle’s songbook is full of big hooks, singalong choruses and Hollywood-sized emotion, and yet in some ways this evening was all surface. Onstage, Carlisle is chatty yet unrevealing. We learn that Summer Rain is her own favourite among her songs, but that’s about as open as she gets.

It’s as open as she needs to be, of course. It’s not incumbent on anyone to expose themselves for our entertainment. But it did make for a frictionless evening.

So much so that when she sang the only Go-Gos track of the night, Our Lips are Sealed, written by her former band mate Jane Wiedlin and the late, great Terry Hall, the controlled anger and resilience of the lyric stuck out for its agitated emotion.

That was during her first encore. Carlisle returned for a second, during which she finally sang a track from her new covers album, Once Upon a Time in California; the Albert Hammond-Mike Hazlewood ballad The Air that I Breathe, a hit for The Hollies back in 1974.  This was one final chance to show off that voice. A chance she took emphatically.