Stephen Malkmus
Koko, London NW1

Either Stephen Malkmus has a portrait going slowly grey in his attic or he is living proof of how the rock'n'roll lifestyle is the key to eternal youth. Since splitting up his former band, flippant, inventive, US indie-rockers Pavement, the singer has looked younger and younger with every passing year.

Perhaps he's no longer as ambitious as he once was. Playing London's Koko, about a quarter of the size of Brixton Academy, where Pavement played their final gig in 1999, Malkmus wore a look of sated contentment, as though he'd just spent the previous hour gorging on Krispy Kreme doughnuts and was bathing in the sugary high.

His third and latest solo album, Face the Truth, is as sharp as ever, full of craggy, prog-rock peaks and pointedly square attempts at disco, which, played live, transformed the crowd from a mass of folded arms and irritable requests for old Pavement songs into a jiggling field of elbows and bobbing heads.

'Don't get hurt; we didn't get insurance!' a grinning Malkmus warned the most excitable of the head-bobbers after he and his well-toured band, the Jicks, gave their current single, 'Baby C'Mon', a thorough seeing-to.

If he wasn't pleased to be there, he made a very good job of pretending.