Morrissey, Royal Albert Hall, London

This charming older man

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It's certainly a fitting adage for our enduring preoccupation with Steven Patrick Morrissey, the erstwhile front man of The Smiths. Only a decade ago, after a series of blunders including the Finsbury Park show at which he appeared wrapped in a Union flag, this morose Mancunian stood accused of arrogance and racism. In the intervening years, he has released one of the poorest albums of his career (1997's Maladjusted), been humiliated in a royalties battle with the two former Smiths Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, and retreated into self-enforced exile in Los Angeles. But even now, with no recording contract, no manager and no sign of a new album, he's managed to fill the Albert Hall, in London, with adoring fans. And they can't get enough of him.

Given the average age of the crowd (most are in their thirties), it's clearly nostalgia that brings them. Even in the early Eighties, when this gladioli-waving singer with a penchant for Oscar Wilde first emerged from his bedroom and assaulted our senses with the single "Hand in Glove" ("the sun shines out of our behinds"!), it was clear that pop music would never be the same again. He was the ultimate pop icon, an impossible act to follow.

From the second he arrives on stage, the atmosphere is one of evangelical obeisance. At 43, Morrissey may have a slightly wider girth and greyer hair, but his presence still fills a room, even one as big as the Albert Hall. He's in an unusually chipper mood, too, cracking jokes at the expense of the press and the music industry and archly welcoming us to "an evening of poetry set to music".

His voice is still a wondrous instrument. While he largely avoids the falsetto of the early days, his singing is as full and impassioned as ever and steeped in sepulchral gloom. Mostly, he draws on songs from his early solo career, among them "Hairdresser on Fire", "Every Day Is Like Sunday", "Suedehead" and a spine-tingling version of "Late Night, Maudlin Street". Perhaps the greatest surprise, however, is the clutch of new songs, among them "The First of the Gang to Die", "Mexico" and the disarmingly Smithsian "I Like You" ("It's about no one you know," our host remarks mischievously). There are, naturally, a couple of Smiths songs, too. During "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out", the stage is suddenly awash with fans flinging themselves at their idol with hopeless abandon.

Maybe the tide is turning for Morrissey again. In a climate where pop stars are created via televised auditions and charisma is deemed unnecessary, he's more sorely missed than ever. Even the NME, the music paper that led the anti-Morrissey campaign in the early Nineties, recently declared him – and the Smiths – the most influential artist of all time. On the strength of this show, it's quite obvious why.