Jarvis Cocker, The Plug, Sheffield

"Behave yourselves," Jarvis Cocker admonishes his erstwhile hometown crowd: "Your mother's here." This is the first time he's played Sheffield in half a decade. He's returned not as the conquering hero of Britpop, but a wandering exile who, as he admits to boos, hasn't actually lived here for 20 years.

What's more, Jarvis hasn't really been a songwriting force for almost a decade, not since Pulp's This is Hardcore (1998), the defining articulation of the post-Britpop comedown and what it's like for shattered men to lose themselves in drink and porn. It was a career suicide-note from which Pulp never recovered. Neither, it seemed, would he.

Finally, though, last year's Jarvis saw him return with songs to match his best, maturely articulating nasty truths, seedy fantasies and profound little hopes. A first live sortie last year found only cautious acceptance. This gig is very different.

With only a dozen or so songs in his solo repertoire, he fills the set out not with "Common People", but stories. He tests out local knowledge and argot from the lost late Eighties, enquiring: "If I were to say, 'I were bricking it before I came on' - is that phrase still in use?" The many old lags in the crowd, and the students to whom he is pop history, love him for it.

Jarvis the performer has barely changed, still jerking his limbs into weird geometries, still compelling. He plays "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time", the sort of bold ballad that could have sustained his stardom, if he'd wanted. His mature strengths are evident in "I Will Kill Again", as he lures us inside the head of the sort of respectable man he should have become by now, and reveals a snakepit of rage and vice. Taken quietly, it gets the first big cheer.

But Jarvis fights against his own misanthropy. "Tonite", meant to shame people into seizing the day, is a quietly heroic song. "Big Julie" continues the lesson; it is about a downtrodden teenage girl given dreams by a pop song. Typically, "Disney Time" then questions dosing children with "dreams of happy endings" the world will only shatter.

By the end, he's inspired. "Black Magic" sees him kick and contort his way into the music. Then it's "Cunts Are Still Ruling the World", his unbroadcastable single about the social chasm the rich justify by believing they are the risen cream: "Well, I say," Jarvis demurs, "shit floats." It's a beautiful, angry, purging song, recalling all that pop and society promised when Jarvis formed Pulp at school in Sheffield in 1981. He leaves with a bashful smile; the prodigal, welcomed back.