Ryan Adams, Astoria, London; <br></br>Pulp, Octagon, Sheffield

It's possibly the single most obvious thing you can say about Ryan Adams, and it's a joke that's been made countless times already, but you'd think he'd do something about his name. Ryan Adams, for speed readers, isn't the check-shirted Canadian with the car crash complexion. He's the former lead singer of acclaimed alt-country act Calexico. I mean Lambchop. Or was it Wilco? No, it's definitely Whiskeytown.

Sure, Ryan Adams is the name his mommy gave him, but that's hardly the point. If she 'd called him Ichael Jackson on Ritney Spears, it still wouldn't be an excuse. When he stepped out of the shadows of Whiskeytown, he had a window of opportunity, a new start. Couldn't he have reinvented himself as Thor Byzantium or Beelzebub Tinseltits or something, like pop stars are meant to? He could at least have placed discreet middle initial between his two names to reduce the similarity to his near-namesake.

As it is, the missing "B" in his name is the first thing people mention, it's a stumbling block to contemplating his own music (tonight's show is ruined by one wag repeatedly shouting for "Run To You"), and I've already wasted two paragraphs discussing it.

Unfortunately, Adams R has a fair bit in common with Adams B - he's an unfailingly down-to-earth, unpretentious, got-my-first-real-six-string type whose everyman tunes would be equally at home in a spit 'n' sawdust bar as a stadium. Fortunately, he's prettier to look at. With the same ruffled nest of black hair as comedian Dylan Moran and the shambolically cutesy looks of an indie film star (it can only be a matter of time before his name's above the title at the Sundance Festival). Tonight, he's his own support act.

He plays two sets: one solo and acoustic, one with a band, the Sweetheart Revolution. As he reappears with his electrically amplified musicians, another wag - evidently the owner of Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall 1966 bootleg - shouts "Judas!".

Adams, aware of his role, shouts back, "I don't believe you, you 're liar" before launching into "New York New York" (his song, not Ol 'Blue Eyes's). He knows his place.

There's something disarming about the honesty of man who is so blatantly influenced by one other artist, and not only doesn 't deny it, but proudly wears that influence on his sleeve. It isn't the music of Bob Dylan that Ryan Adams's most resembles, it's that of Gram Parsons. His official press release unashamedly describes Whiskeytown as "arguably the greatest post-Gram band to come down the musical pike", and tonight he highlights his debt with a cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' "Sin City".

Other covers which punctuate his set tonight include the Stones' "Brown Sugar", The Ramones' "I Don't Wanna Work", and Elton John's "Rocket Man". There's something little airbrushed about Adams's happy-go-lucky, elbow-out-the-window country rock and you have to question the taste of man who has written a song in tribute to Shania Twain. Adams has none of the redeeming self-loathing of, say, a Bonnie "Prince" Billy.

The ecstatic singalong which greets "When The Stars Turn Blue", however, suggests a sizeable constituency who can live without self-loathing right now. It's for them that Adams plays on through the pain of broken wrist. Everything he does, he does it for you.

There are two classic symptoms of nervousness. One is to dry up and fall silent. The other is precisely the opposite: to gabble like Kathy Lette after 20 cappuccinos.

A shoeless and shaver-shy Jarvis Cocker, on the night of Pulp's first Sheffield gig in many a year, is very nervous - he's a "southern poof now", he self-deprecatingly confesses, so he wants to make a good impression on his hometown - and he can't shut up. Luckily, he is Jarvis Cocker, and not Kathy Lette, and therefore very funny.

After the ever-lovely "what if?" song "Something Changed" (Pulp's romantic take on the "Different Corner"/Sliding Doors parallel universe conundrum), he gets his tongue and his knickers in a twist dedicating the song to his sister Saskia: "I love her, but I 'm not in love with her".

Some monologues are surreal and Izzardesque (mic stands with arthritis), others fall into the realm of observational comedy (those stubby pens you get in Argos). Many of his quips are very Sheffield-specific, describing the chimneys on a local pub rooftop that look like suits of armour, or deadpanning "I live on the edge. Nether Edge." And Pulp, of course, are a very Sheffield-specific band. "Wicker Man", Cocker's spoken-word odyssey through the streets of his childhood, forms the third part of trilogy that began with "Sheffield Sex City" and continued with "Deep Fried In Kelvin".

Cocker's humour is a useful sweetener to the bitter pill of the set list, which is unforgivingly tilted towards Pulp's brilliant, but not exactly hit- packed, new album We Love Life. Even its most potentially poptastic extract, "The Night That Minnie Timperly Died" (anthemic chorus, chunky guitar riff nicked from Primal Scream's "Loaded") , is about the radio-unfriendly subject of paedophile child murder.

Usually, when a band refuses to wheel out the hits, it's a worrying sign, indicating that they resent their fame and don't want to be liked. In the case of Pulp, the less-familiar corners of their back catalogue are so good that you barely notice the absence of "Lipgloss"or "Do You Remember The First Time".

"Anorexic Beauty", for instance, is a song from the days when only John Peel and Jarvis's mum had heard of Pulp. "Laughing Boy"is a song that even they didn't know (apparently it was the B-side of "Help The Aged") , but I 'm glad to make its acquaintance. We all have personal favourites that we want to hear, of course, and when someone throws him a fluffy pink oven glove with the inscription "PINK GLOVE", Jarvis admits that they tried that song in rehearsals "but it sounded crap". (The next song, aptly, is "Bad Cover Version", which is, thematically, "Pink Glove Part 2".) Not that the set is devoid of classics. It doesn't matter how often you hear "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.", those sudden staccato stabs still spear you as sharply and shockingly as a shaft of ice falling from the wingtip of 767.

The orgasmic climax of "Babies" ("my god!") and a chilling "The Fear" are also among the highlights.

We have time for one more song, says Jarvis. As the Octagon prepares to bounce to the opening chords to "Common People", Cocker has a surprise up his crimplene sleeve. For the first time I can recall since they wrote the song, Pulp fail to play their greatest hit. Instead, we get "Underwear". A B-side, yes. An album track, yes. But a classic one: full of all the painfully precise observation and exquisitely expressed emotional turmoil that characterises their entire oeuvre. No one asks for refunds.