Roddy Frame, The Borderline, London

It wasn't exactly all fields around here when I was a lad. But audiences of the 1980s were, you feel, slightly more receptive than their modern-day counterparts to the wit and craftsmanship of sensitive and underfed young men with acoustic guitars. These singer-songwriters couldn't have prised apart a bourbon biscuit between them, but it was musical muscle that got their albums on to student turntables, where they stayed until everything had to be bought all over again on CD.

I'll throw some names at you. Stephen Duffy. Paddy McAloon. Edwyn Collins. Martin Stephenson. And Roddy Frame, who saddled his band with the silly name Aztec Camera, landed a record deal before he had started shaving, and penned canny and allusive songs about love lost or longed for that made him the Elvis Costello of East Kilbride.

Frame remains a picture of youthfulness. He's still wiry, with a wedge of tousled hair. The only hint that he's getting on is that he has just begun a stint at the Borderline in London's West End. The residency is a sign that the erratic pleasures of life on the road have been traded for the relative comfort of a familiar dressing room.

Frame kept warning us that he might be rusty, though in truth it's only been six months since his last London show, with Edwyn Collins. "Where is Edwyn?" he mused. "Having a Bacardi with Linda Lusardi." Then there was some blather about a throat infection, and a sorry tale about visiting the doctor. Excuses, excuses.

In fact, Frame sounded magnificent. His mighty cry of "High land, hard rain" at the end of the set's best song, "The Boy Wonders", blasted the cobwebs from the ceiling, and he dexterously dispensed with the mid-song tongue-twister that must, along with Blondie's "Atomic", represent one of the first appearances of rap in white music.

"The Boy Wonders" is nearly 20 years old, and as beautifully barbed as ever, which leaves us no choice but to call it timeless. This is not such an insult now that it's acceptable to listen to Radio 2. (Who could have foreseen that back in 1983?)

It was thrilling to hear "Down the Dip" and "The Bugle Sounds Again" being passionately attacked with an acoustic 12-string guitar that liberated them from nostalgia. Frame also ventured an energetic romp through "Somewhere in My Heart", with some wag in the crowd contributing the "Woo-ooo-ooo-ooh" bit in the chorus. ("Could you make that slightly more soulful?" Frame asked.)

Even the unfamiliar numbers from his latest album, Surf, elicited immediate goodwill, especially the tender "Tough", in which the delivery of the title smarts suddenly like a sock in the jaw. That's when you know you've been Framed.

Roddy Frame plays the Borderline, London, W1, on 30 July, and 6 and 13 August