Even the shortest version of Jimmy Webb's biography runs to several pages of awards and accolades. By the Time I Get to Phoenix is apparently the third most performed song in the past 50 years, and Webb is the only artist to have won Grammy awards for music, lyrics and orchestration.

So you might have expected to find him riding into town in an open-topped limousine while cheering crowds threw confetti. Instead, he was alone at the Lyric with his piano, rummaging through highlights from his cavernous back catalogue and samples from his new album, Twilight of the Renegades. The theatre was filled with Webb connoisseurs, yelling out names of songs stretching back 30-odd years, but for better or worse - and let's face it, it's worse - he represents an era of songwriting craft that is passing into history. "I wish they hadn't invented computers," he said. "They're puttin' us out of business."

Webb's music has never fitted into a single category: it somehow spans pop, country, musical theatre and vaudeville. Here, he linked his pieces together with some well-polished yarn-spinning, like the one about driving around Ireland with theactor Richard Harris (who recorded Webb's MacArthur Park and Didn't We), or the time he ended up on stage at Farm Aid, impersonating Johnny Cash alongside Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson.

Webb is a handy pianist but an erratic singer, his voice sometimes disintegrating under the pressure of reaching the high notes, but he knows how to coax the fine nuances from his music. By the Time I Get to Phoenix was an odyssey of heartache, with Webb's repeated right-hand trill mimicking the ringing of an unanswered phone. Wichita Lineman evoked the endless horizons of the American midwest.

Of his new songs, How Quickly and No Signs of Age seemed likely to wear the best. For an encore, Webb attempted the epic folly that is MacArthur Park - "Believe me, it's an adventure" - and made an astonishingly good job of it. He could have played for twice as long and nobody would have left.