Ice-cool Ashcroft is back in business

After splitting his band the Verve in 1999, his subsequent music lacked life and focus, but he never stopped looking the part.

Icicle-cool this evening in tight leather jacket and aviator shades, at 34 he still seemed to have been constructed in a laboratory from the best bits of rock legends past.

But there was one addition - a broad grin, presumably a sideeffect of knowing that on January's third solo album, Keys to the World, he finally has some songs to sit comfortably alongside his Verve hits.

Words Just Get In The Way sounded like another big single, a mid-paced ballad that touched the emotional heights of The Drugs Don't Work, also aired here. Music is Power was a loose-limbed anthem with genuine soul, and the title track was a bass-heavy groove with a surprising hint of reggae in the guitar.

Ashcroft skated past his previous solo albums without pausing for long, although 2000's New York was an impressively noisy freakout. But it was the stunning pomp of Bittersweet Symphony, aired for the first time in six years and cheekily transforming into Sly & The Family Stone's Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), that really showed a man ready to take on the world once more. It's good to have him back.

Richard Ashcroft And The United Nation of Sound