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The last time Elvis Costello was in the news, 18 months ago, he was saying he'd had an operation to remove a "small but very aggressive cancerous malignancy." Seeing him in action now, you'd never know it.
He plays for two hours without a break, and tears into the faster songs as if it was 1979 all over again.
A brush with mortality can send a man hurtling back to his heyday. At 65, Costello has had his bus pass for a while, but the songs he is playing on the Just Trust tour were mostly written when he still had a young person's railcard.
Of the 24 tracks, 17 come from his first six albums, the purple patch that ran from My Aim Is True in 1977 to Almost Blue in 1981.
To be a teenager then was to hang on his every word, and there were a lot of them. The young Costello burst out of Liverpool and gave verbosity a good name. "Watching The Detectives" and "Oliver's Army" have never gone away, and tonight they're joined by overshadowed siblings such as "Green Shirt" and "High Fidelity," which have just as much bite.
Costello is a genial host, cracking jokes and saying he loves Southampton because "you send all your best players to Liverpool." But he can still summon his old truculence for "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea," his tenderness for "Alison," his tortured lust for "Pump It Up," and about six emotions at once for "Accidents Will Happen."
"Unwanted Number," from last year's Grammy-winning album Look Now, is one of only two songs from the past 35 years, but there are two more from the future. Costello has been working on a musical, an adaptation of Elia Kazan's 1957 film A Face In The Crowd.
The two tasters make a warm interlude, as his roof-raising backing singers, Briana Lee and Kitten Kuroi, gather around the piano.
Words, of course, are not enough. Costello's classics are also memorable pieces of music. As he plays rhythm guitar – with his old mates Steve Nieve on keyboards and Pete Thomas on drums, and his newer mate Davey Faragher on bass – you realise that the whole band is a rhythm section, pressing home those punchlines.
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