Dapper in black with a shock of pure white hair, Gene Pitney bounds on stage, looking a little like Paul Gambaccini and a little like the man who enjoyed his shave so much, he bought the company. His band play a perky medley intro in the style of a Broadway overture as he peers into the audience, pointing as if he has spotted an old friend or is removing smuts from an invisible window. Instantly, we are in another world: a world of Tin Pan Alley song-writing teams, of showbusiness, of the old razzle-dazzle. You don't get that with Mogwai.
At 62, Pitney still has a marvellous voice: it's an extraordinary instrument, sounding like a choir of angry bees. He swings into 24 Hours From Tulsa as he has done on every other night of this 21-date tour. (This is the last show; the previous evening saw him in Croydon.) Then he explains, somewhat alarmingly, that he "woke up dreaming" of doing a reggae version of Randy Newman's exquisite Nobody Needs Your Love - and reggae, albeit a clipped, bleached version of reggae, is what we get. In early, jauntily pre-feminism songs like Who Needs It ("Who needs it? Nobody needs it - much as I need it now"), he neatly balances sitcom misogyny with the need for brief relief.
If the band sometimes seem to be cranking out the hits like clockwork, then it is, at least, the finest precision Swiss mechanism. Pitney's 1960s hits such as Backstage, mini-melodramas of grandiloquent self-pity, and a soaring Looking Through the Eyes of Love are magnificent. This being showbusiness, Pitney pauses to "acknowledge all the things that have been sent backstage". "Get me knickers?" comes a cry from the audience. There are letters from fans of 40 years' standing, cards from fans who have brought their 10-year-old daughter ("It's her first concert"), all steeped in seaside innuendo.
Though he never seems to be giving less than his all, Pitney would do better to sweat the songs a little, let them breathe. When he plays pretty acoustic guitar on the opening of a Harry Belafonte medley, without the band, you wish he would do more songs this way. But the people who come to see Gene Pitney probably don't need any of this. They come to be reassured that their memories are in safe hands, and for a drop of Vegas in W1. Or Croydon.
