Once it all seemed so easy for Roddy Frame. In 1983, as leader of Aztec Camera, the 19-year-old had a hit album, a top 20 single and a major American deal. Suggestions that he would be the British songwriter of his generation seemed entirely reasonable.

Then, as if for a prodigy footballer whose youthful successes herald only a career as a postman, it all went wrong. The brutal truth is that he wasn't a songwriting genius after all. Almost 20 years on he is reduced to playing a tiny, albeit heaving, London venue solo.

If his spirit is crushed, he is too professional to let it show. His lightning guitar-playing remains a treat, and age has certainly not withered his plaintive voice. But he has a time-honoured problem: he wants to play material from his unreleased new album, and the audience want to hear older, familiar fare. The twain cannot meet.

He knows it, too. Before slipping in Tough he says: "This is a new one; sadly you're hemmed in too tightly to get to the bar." Initially though, he gets it right and gives every indication of being about to précis his career. He begins with his 1995 single Sun, before easing into his biggest hit, 1988's still-spirit-raising Somewhere in My Heart, which precedes The Boy Wonders and The Bugle Sounds Again, both from his debut. Then Frame gets ahead of himself and unleashes the new material.

Here, a second problem asserts itself: the new material, with the exception of the Mr Bojangles-like Mixed Up Love, has little of the verve or vitality of the old. Frame is called back for two encores. The second comes long after the lights have gone up, but the sense of disappointment is almost palpable when he chooses to exit with the mournful, new For What It Was, rather than Oblivious, Walk Out to Winter, or, indeed, any of the songs the supportive crowd had politely asked for all evening. Sometimes, giving people a little of what they want goes a long way.

· Roddy Frame plays the Glee Club, Birmingham (0870 241 5093), tonight, then tours to London and Edinburgh.