Your new songs show you still have a gift despite the fact you appear to be too much trouble for any record company to take on. Almost four years without a contract?! When your band is this good and you are able to deal with your entire repertoire so well? Something is not right. Especially when the startling lines are still alive and thrown to us as hurtful as ever in fresh, pearling tunes like The First of the Gang to Die: "You have never been in love, until you have seen the stars, reflected in the reservoirs!" Words that make us feel young again and deadened inside and dazzled and alone all at once.

So you have come to town and danced for us. Sang songs we loved and new songs that impressed, though sometimes there was a heaviness to latter that bogged the light machinery of your original muse, too much rock maybe, not enough pop. But that's a flickering criticism, not a drama. Mostly you entranced us and took us places and made us wonder whom you were and where you were at right now, this minute? Greying at the temples, persisting with your quiff despite a propensity for baldness, dressed like a man who is not quite as slim as he would like to believe, a rock star in mid-life denial.

I'll tell you the truth: I see you up there and I have the image of a boy at his mother's house, playing at being a star, practicing in the mirror all the things that would make him great, all the words and lines that would impress the world and defend him from its slights and spurs. How is one to know that dreams can come true? That all which defends can also imprison? That lonely boys can simply become lonely men, for all the wonder that they make, if they do not let someone in - most of all when they exchange the love of one for the love of the world, a public brutal and adoring that will always have you even when you have no one at all. Yes, you saw yourself in the mirror as a boy. And here you are today, entertaining us, impressing us, saying yes and no.