Mick Jagger once asked, "What else can a poor boy do, 'cept sing for a rock'n'roll band?" and the same question seems to have troubled James Dean Bradfield. Quickly becoming bored during the Manic Street Preachers' two-year sabbatical, he finds himself launching a solo career he never really planned. The irony is that the songs on The Great Western, Bradfield's forthcoming debut, are at least as good as anything he's recorded with his band.

Crammed into the tiniest venue he's played in 15 years, Bradfield seems initially distracted by the surroundings and new musicians. "This seems weird," he admits; but before long, the black-shirted singer-guitarist is skipping round the stage in exhilaration. He wrote the songs on the train from Cardiff to Paddington, scene of the Preachers' first steps to success, and they feel like eruptions of pent-up emotion.

Musically somewhere between the Manics' Everything Must Go and Mott the Hoople, some songs look back to his childhood, early days with the group and tragedies beyond guitarist Richey Edwards' disappearance. English Gentleman movingly remembers Philip Hall, whose pivotal role as the Manics' publicist-mentor was curtailed by cancer.

A chasm exists between the curiously uplifting melancholy of the songs and the banter between them, giving the gig the magical atmosphere of catharsis heightened by laughter. He introduces one song as being about "an old lady who lived above me and called me, 'the fucking idiot'." "That's not very nice!" someone shrieks. He teases people with Manics introductions and plays Ocean Spray, Bradfield's only previous lyric, about his mother's death, before unveiling Run Romeo Run, a headrushing jewel about escape from various demons.

The working-class Welshman has occasionally seemed uncomfortable with "stardom" and emotions, but in finding the courage to lay himself this bare, he has found a powerful new voice.