Ray Davies' 40 years in the music industry have not dimmed his enthusiasm. The former Kinks singer takes to the stage like a beat-pop version of Peter Snow, waving his arms and mugging wildly to the reverent audience applause. He may be on such exuberant form because he knows he has a musical ace up his sleeve. At 61 he is a tad long-in-the-tooth for debut solo albums, but Other People's Lives is a masterpiece of wry, observational pop that shows this veteran is far from a spent force.

He looks pretty good, too - dapper, rake-thin and still executing a mean scissor jump. Yet the first part of the show is wilfully obscure, covering the 1966 power-pop B-side I'm Not Like Everybody Else and reviving four tracks from the bucolic 1968 concept album Village Green Preservation Society.

The delicate new material suggests Davies should have started making solo records 20 years ago. The Dylan-esque Next Door Neighbour and Creatures of Little Faith are nostalgic reveries on the nature of human frailty, while the geezerish Stand-Up Comic reaffirms the huge debt owed by Parklife-era Blur.

Inevitably, it's the back catalogue that raises the roof. All Day and All of the Night and You Really Got Me become beery mass singalongs but far more affecting is Days, the nuanced musing on intimations of mortality covered by the late Kirsty MacColl. He encores with Lola and the gorgeous Waterloo Sunset. The flush of youth has long gone but Ray Davies seems poised for a poignant Indian summer.