This was a text book case of giving the people what they want.

If they wanted the hits, they got them: the chirpy classic geezer pop of Squeeze's Tempted and a smattering from Mike & the Mechanics. What seemed, though, to be the main attraction - and quite right too - was Paul Carrack's distinctive blue-eyed soul voice.

Carrack has served a long time as a go-to singer who'll enhance other people's records, bands and tours but he's also built and maintained his own following, as a near-capacity audience here confirmed, the old-fashioned, get in the van and graft way. Backed by a very well-orchestrated and impressively together band, complete with two drummers laying down a relaxed, sumptuous beat, he didn't hang about and didn't over-indulge the band with solo space. Song briskly followed song and if the hits provided the significant signposts, his own back catalogue and newer material put in the hard miles.

His milieu is the three minute teenage opera favoured by Stax and Motown and he continues that tradition in style, even if the lyrics might look to more mature concerns and feelings, like That's What Matters to Me's message to his job-jettisoning, world-travelling daughter. Through these, a faithful acoustic guitar and harmonica rack-toting reading of Bruce Springsteen's If I Fall Behind, the smooth Love Will Keep Us Alive, which he co-wrote for The Eagles, and an impassioned revisiting of Brenda Lee's I'm Losing You, his voice delivered the goods. And then, late on, came How Long, forty years old this year and somehow