"Did you know you actually have to enter the Mercury prize? I didn't know that. You don't just get picked, you have to enter it," Lloyd Cole says, letting the words hang as he tunes his guitar between songs. Which was why, he was too modest to add, his latest album, Standards, wasn't on last year's shortlist, despite showing the singer's undimmed faculty for heartfelt rumination. This solo acoustic show is speckled with other little stories of wrong moves and advice unheeded – there was the A&R man who told him to stop using "babe" so often in lyrics, and Cole now thinks he was right – but there's nothing downbeat about the two-hour set.

What Cole has gained, along with a burnishing of his singing voice and Americanising of his accent – he's lived in Massachusetts for 20 years – is perspective. The intense young poet of the 1980s is now the wry philosopher; not for nothing does he start with Past Imperfect, which asks: "What was on my mind in Amsterdam in 1984?" The hit that it references, Lost Weekend, comes at the end of the main set. Between the two, he plays 25 tracks from all phases of his 30-year career.

Mostly, these are faithful renditions with the odd garnish, such as a diversion into alt-country on the otherwise poppy 1985 track Perfect Blue. Playing them acoustically directs attention to the lyrics, which still startle with their unfiltered honesty – the line "Born 1961, just like you", from the 2013 track Period Piece, is both statement and rallying cry to this similarly-aged crowd. If Cole was once too bedsitty for his own good – witness the overly knowing mention of Greta Garbo and Cosmopolitan in the rapturously received Perfect Skin – he has matured into an artist who is now wise, as well as clever.

At Subscription Rooms, Stroud, GL5 1AE, 10 April. Box office: 01453 760999. Then touring.

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