Jarvis Cocker could reasonably have expected not to be missed. His band Pulp's last limp hurrah, a 2002 greatest hits album, failed to chart, and his follow-up electro project, Relaxed Muscle, was better seen and not heard. And preferably not seen.

But like Morrissey, another idiosyncratic idol who moved abroad after facing mass indifference in his homeland, Jarvis's time in France has certainly made national hearts grow fonder. Although now calling himself a solo artist and releasing an album, Kylie-style, with just his first name on the cover, his new set-up is not so different from his old band's.

Pulp cohorts Richard Hawley, Steve Mackey and Candida Doyle were all on stage last night. Yet suddenly once again the world seems more than willing to listen to what the weed in tweed has to say.

Good feeling filled the room at his third ever solo show. A lone bonehead insisted on roaring "Go on Jarv!" every seven seconds throughout. Someone released a number of red balloons that said "Cyril's 80th", apparently to the singer's surprise. There was only mild disappointment when he finally announced that he was going to perform an old song, and it turned out to be David Bowie's Space Oddity.

For Pulp numbers were entirely absent, a brave move for someone whose best work helped to define the Nineties. The basic punk of raw opener Fat Children could have indicated a bold new direction, but much of the other material could have sat happily next to his older efforts.

Tender ballad Heavy Weather in particular could have appeared on Pulp's nature-fixated final album We Love Life. Bleak piano piece I Will Kill Again revisited the same theme Jarvis has been exploring for years, that of the dark secrets lurking beneath apparently normal lives.

More striking were Don't Let Him Waste Your Time, a swaying anthem originally written for Nancy Sinatra, and One Man Show, a slow-builder with a slinky bass that inexplicably doesn't appear on his album. Black Magic was fantastic, a stop-start rocker that saw the most expressive fingers in music working overtime.

But it was hard to go home humming anything other than Running the World, the song that announced his summer comeback with an obscene summary of exactly what he makes of our leaders. Perhaps that's why Jarvis Cocker has been most missed - he still has a gift for saying, eloquently or otherwise, exactly what we're thinking.