Nick Cave @ Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, 26 April

If Nick Cave was taking his seat in the Royal Concert Hall as an anonymous audience member rather than strolling on stage as the star performer, his appearance could still turn heads. Dressed in trademark dark suit and open-necked shirt, his tall frame and slicked back hair mark him out as a man knowingly making a statement. He describes this look as resembling "travelling oboe salesmen from Weimar Germany," of which there are surely few resident in Glasgow tonight.

As quickly as Cave sits down at his piano, he exits stage right. "I don't have the chords... it is the first night of the tour," he growls on the way back, before leading his four-piece band into Water's Edge, a choice cut from the excellent 2013 Bad Seeds album Push the Sky Away.

Although billed as a solo show (which one initially suspected would concern his recent series of touring vignettes, compiled as The Sickbag Song), the best moments of the evening are in fact those fully involving a surprise appearance from his Bad Seeds – particularly anything wild-haired sideman Warren Ellis takes the lead on. A solo rendition of The Weeping Song is pleasing, rather than engrossing, whereas the barely controlled hysteria of Red Right Hand provokes a suitably wild reaction from those assembled; some audience members never quite regain their composure. A particularly poignant rendition of Into My Arms is slightly spoiled by the self-centred catcalls and relentless unauthorised flash photography that bookend it.

Cave and his legion are too long in the tooth to be bothered by such relatively minor distractions, of course. "I can't understand you," he casually dismisses one shout of undying love. Well into his third decade of showbusiness, Cave's stage presence, and particularly his voice, have never been better, and this is a commanding performance from a man still capable of hitting creative peaks. A perfect marriage of early era Cave and new.