"Is everyone alright up there?" asks Roddy Frame, eyeing the venue's miniscule balcony. "It's just like the Palladium in here." Hardly, but the Scottish singer-songwriter has been daring to dream ever since his old band Aztec Camera's 1983 debut, High Land, Hard Rain, catapulted him from East Kilbride to international stardom when he was just 19. Appearances are rarer now, but his enduring reputation as one of the finest songwriters of the last 30 years means gigs like this are a white-hot ticket.

The Frame of 2011 isn't the political idealist who once offered his help to the National Union of Mineworkers, but a romantic wordsmith who documents love's ups and downs with guitars, big tunes and words as poetically beautiful as "Clusters of heavenly jewels, gaze down on Earth's lonely fools."

With his perfect quiff, soaring croon, stunning fingerpicking and chiming jangles, Frame could almost be Morrissey and Marr inhabiting the same body. In plain black shirt, the handsome 47-year-old looks absurdly youthful, eschewing the Postcard Records-era fashion sense inspired by Mark E Smith's tank tops, and visibly thrilled to be back.

"I'm not prolific," he quips, perhaps unwittingly explaining his career stops and starts. But the new White Pony – inspired by the late film-maker John Hughes's mentoring of a young girl – sounds every bit as skyscraping as the oldies. From Oblivious to a tear-jerking Down the Dip, they tumble forth in an embarrassment of riches. When the crowd sing the first verse of Walk Out to Winter, you fear grown men will start weeping, but a euphoric Somewhere in My Heart suggests Frame is the sound of forever-young Scotland, immortalised by the belief: "The closest thing to heaven is to rock'n'roll."