Meatloaf, Hyde Park Route of Kings, London <br></br>McAlmont & Butler, Cherry Jam, London

One of these men sings like a skylark

On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red rose? Ah, I bet you say that to all the pop critics.

He's the man with breasts from Fight Club now of course, the bus driver from Spiceworld, but try to picture 2002's short-cropped, balding, satin-tent-shirted Meatloaf as he was in 1977 – frock-coated and frilly-cuffed, long greasy tresses stuck to his forehead by sweat – and you're still looking at a man who, every bit as much as the more critically endorsed Bruce Springsteen, is one of the great rock'n'roll romantics.

Meatloaf's credibility deficit can partly be traced to the fact that he never wrote his songs. He was the ventriloquist's dummy of Jim Steinman, the Phil Spector of heavy rock and a deranged visionary who used to lure prospective singers into his office by laying arrows made of Smarties on the corridor carpet (in Meatloaf's case, maybe he used cheeseburgers).

But Steinman was/is an American poet to rival Springsteen (lines like "we're glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife" don't just write themselves), and even on records by the non-recuperable likes of Bonnie Tyler ("Total Eclipse of the Heart") and Celine Dion ("It's All Coming Back to Me Now"), he achieves an appealingly grandiose ludicrousness.

His best work, though, was with the 50-year-old lumbering around Hyde Park tonight. Steinman/Meatloaf understood, as few others have, the eternal fundamentals of sex and drums and rock'n'roll and brew, and fashioned them into white trash operas, always dreaming of escape from "... this rotting old hole" where "everything is stunted and lost / and nothing really rocks, and nothing really rolls, and nothing's ever worth the cost". (This is still Meat's constituency: the Summer Tour takes in such obscure towns as Kelseyville, Robinsonville, Merrillville and Leeds.) Meatloaf was always an absurd, freakish specimen – a tragic/ heroic Beast to some badly miscast Beauty with an Anita Dobson perm – and youth and beauty were never his USP, so there's no reason, in theory, why he shouldn't still be doing it now.

However, there are some effects of ageing that can't be denied. His larynx ain't what it used to be – he frequently dodges the high notes – and every song has an elongated boogie-woogie intro to allow him to catch his breath (he often looks like he's running for a bus).

Not that his audience begrudges him. The generation who bought enough albums to make Meatloaf a regular fixture in my childhood Guinness Book Of Records are now in slacks and comfortable shoes, and carry picnic hampers.

In any case, Meatloaf's showmanship is hard to fault. These days, the Ellen Foley role is played by Patricia Russo, who looks like one of those RealDolls you can buy on the net, and they make every song into a pantomime, stalking each other across the stage for the hilarious verbal diarrhoea of "Dead Ringer for Love", and scowling comically throughout "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".

During one intro, he's heckled, and momentarily loses it. "Shut the fuck up. Everything bad that happens in the rest of our fucking lives, we're gonna blame on you." He eventually regains his composure for "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)", the best song about male revulsion at cunnilingus this side of ... well, some reggae thing you've never heard of. It's a rare lapse of good humour, and soon he's inviting a deluge of bras – pink, turquoise, purple, white – from the crowd, which he ties, trophy-like, to his mike stand (his record, he claims, is 500).

Inevitably, "Bat out of Hell" (has rock ever given us a line as exhilaratingly ridiculous as "I'm gonna hit the highway like a battering ram on a silver black phantom bike"?) provides the suitably baroque finale.

Songs great, show great, voice shot to pieces. But two out of three ain't bad.

I've been trying hard to imagine a less likely reunion than McAlmont & Butler, but with the theoretical exception of Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, I'm struggling.

Before Bernard Butler left Suede, having helped them make two of the finest albums of the 1990s, he seemed irritated with the cult of personality and trappings of campness which increasingly surrounded the band.

What he did next, then, made little sense: he hooked up with David McAlmont, a very tall, very black, very gay and very flamboyant man who had briefly caused a stir with the excellent Thieves.

Together they made the single "Yes", one of the classic I-will-survive songs, and one patchy album, before reportedly falling out due to what one might politely term a personality clash, and going back to solo careers.

Bernard Butler is a remarkably talented musician. The trouble with remarkably talented musicians is that they often have little idea about what constitutes a great pop song, and need someone less talented, but more conceptually minded – Brett Anderson, for example – to harness them. That's why, as a solo artist, Butler sucked. After Bernard's second album fell victim to the collapse of Creation records and David's career stalled, they seem to have realised they needed each other more than they thought.

It's our gain. Bring It Back, the forthcoming album, is way better than we had any right to expect. A wildly attractive mix of orchestral pop and Sixties soul – Burt Bacharach meets Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – it's the sort of record that has you weeping tears of joy.

This acoustic showcase is the penultimate leg of a month of Mondays (the final one is tomorrow) at this groovy West London cellar.

David and Bernard are alone, using just handclaps and tambourines for percussion, a harmonica to suggest the strings, and allowing us to mentally fill in the gaps (in August, they'll be playing with a full band). On the swoonsome new single "Falling", the funky title track, and, naturally, "Yes" (plus an unexpected, but beautiful, rendition of Fat Larry's Band's "Zoom"), it works surprisingly well.

David's cascading baby dreads have been shaven down to iron filings and his Basseyesque white feather coat has been replaced by a sober checked shirt, but there's no mistaking that voice, a falsetto which soars like a skylark and wrenches your heart from your chest. Bernard's own voice has grown stronger, confidently providing harmonies, and, astonishingly for anyone who remembers his taciturn temperament in the Suede days, he's relaxed enough to actually speak on the mike.

The biggest shock of all, though, is simply seeing them standing within five feet of each other.

Sometimes pigs do fly.

s.price@independent.co.uk

Meatloaf: Cardiff Castle, Wales (0870 333 6205), today; King's Dock, Liverpool, tomorrow. McAlmont & Butler: Cherry Jam, London W2 (020 7727 9950), tomorrow; Scala, London N1 (020 7833 2022), 13 August; Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh (0131 225 2564), 16 August; Hylands Park, Chelmsford (020 7287 0932), 17 August; Weston Park, Staffordshire (0870 120 2002), 18 August