There must be plenty of struggling young folk musicians out there who can’t wait to be 60. That’s the age when the kudos finally start to roll in, it seems.

Sexagenarian Detroit guitarist Sixto Rodriguez has recently joined fellow lost folkies Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs in being rediscovered decades after their albums had registered barely a ripple among their contemporaries.

This was only his second ever London concert, although strangely, he’s been well loved by South Africans and Australians for longer, which explains an uncharacteristically rowdy Barbican audience.

Jive talking as though the Sixties were still going, his sharp, biting voice sounding exactly as it does on marvellous recently reissued
1970 album Cold Fact, the intervening decades of teaching and working in motor factories must have been kind.

The rapid strumming and spat lyrics of Inner City Blues and This Is Not A Song, It’s An Outburst, had some of the style and venom of mid-Sixties Dylan.

I Wonder and Like Janis demonstrated a fine ear for a pop tune but the greatest applause was reserved for signature song Sugarman, a dreamy, psychedelic appeal to a drug dealer to hurry over.

“It’s a descriptive song, not a prescriptive song. Stay off drugs,” warned the older, wiser man in the spotlight, making the most of the ­
fact that people, at last, are listening to him.