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John Aizlewood's rating
Reader rating
Description: The veteran singer-songwriter and Kinks frontman plays a solo set.
Phone: 0207589 8212
Website: www.royalalberthall.com
Trains: Tube: High Street Kensington 
, Tube / Bus: 9, 10, 52, 360 
Extra info: Pub, Food
Not just nostalgia: Ray Davies still writes great songs
"Sing along. Have no shame," ordered Ray Davies, former Kink, erstwhile curmudgeon and a man, rather like our outgoing Prime Minister, whose place in history is far from certain. "These songs are part of my life and part of your life."
Now 63 and getting more avuncular by the year, Davies is a man reborn in the wake of last year's Other People's Lives album, his first work in decades to stand alongside the Kinks' finest.
Indeed, he enjoyed the experience so much there's another due before the year's end and he even unveiled two intriguing new songs from it, No One Listens and The Invisible Man. No longer being a nostalgia act has transformed his canon into something to be celebrated rather than grudgingly wheeled out.
In fact, Davies is so delighted with his new status that his show and its two-set, two-hour format was almost identical to the one he brought to the same venue in September 2005 and the new(ish) Next Door Neighbours and The Tourist are becoming more old friends and less exciting proof of a still-prodigious talent.
That familiarity perhaps explained an oddly flat audience and Davies's constant, needy invocations to clap hands and join in. This time, though, there was the magical Come Dancing, Davies's loving, sepia-tinged paean to a more courtly era and the last great Kinks moment.
The noisy hits were rendered with verve and even the hoary old You Really Got Me was given new relevance by Davies's anecdote about its conception, while the raucous closer, Victoria, featured ex-Kinks drummer Mick Avery (dressed, unsettlingly, in a Boy Scout's uniform), looking uncomfortable on tambourine.
Bluster aside, Davies's real strength always lay in the tender, most tellingly the luminous Days, the elegiac Village Green (dedicated to broadcaster Ned Sherrin) and the piece of pop perfection that is Waterloo Sunset.
"I don't know why I still play that song," chuckled Davies. He should: it's his best hope of immortality.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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