As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.

Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on the piano. Not for him an autocue – Sedaka has it all in his head and under his hands. Here’s one man unlikely ever to suffer from brain fade. Only the knees and the hips have aged – when he gets up from the piano stool, occasionally for a little bop, you notice his stiff gait.

Sedaka's is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure

In recent years, he has played with an orchestra. This time round he was completely solo, a man and his piano. Alone on stage, a screen projecting his image to those in what his friend John Lennon (for whom he wrote “The Immigrant”) would have called “the cheaper seats”, he cut a cheerfully unstagey figure. Sedaka is what an old-fashioned men’s outfitter would call “short and portly” – rather like Elton, who did much to rejuvenate his career in the mid-1970s, but the threads are more sedate: a blue sport coat atop an open-necked black shirt and slacks (as he’d surely call them) and comfy-looking shoes. His silvery hair is combed over and he has jowls – in other words, he’s happy to look onstage like the 78-year-old grandfather he is offstage. His eyes twinkle and when he refers to himself in the third person it’s mostly to poke fun.

The back projection offered close-ups of his hands and it’s fascinating to watch him play. For Sedaka is a real pianist, one who would most likely have pursued a classical career had he not heard the siren call of 1950s pop. He won a junior scholarship to the Juilliard when he was just eight years old, travelling to Manhattan from Brighton Beach for lessons. At 16 he played Debussy and Prokofiev for Arthur Rubenstein.

These days, he told us, his songs are written over a vodka martini or two, but those early hits which emanated from Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building were fuelled only by Coca-Cola and teenage effervescence as Sedaka teamed up with Howie Greenfield to write a string of hits that remain as fresh today as when they were written and which have been recorded by a roll-call of singers, from Frank Sinatra to Sheryl Crow via Elvis, Tom Jones, the Carpenters, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney and Connie Francis, and he’s featured in The Simpsons.

At the Albert Hall, the hits just kept on comin’: “The Queen of 1964”, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”, “Standing on the Inside”, “Our Last Song Together” (the last song he wrote with Greenfield following a 25-year partnership), “Solitaire”, “Where The Boys Are”, “Laughter in the Rain”, “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen”, “Next Door to An Angel”, “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “The Hungry Years”, “Betty Grable” and of course “Oh Carole”, written for his high school sweetheart Carole Klein, who the world came to know as Carole King. During a brief comfort break, a Cinebox video of “Calendar Girl” was played, Sedaka in red jacket and perma-tan, “the girls” in bikinis and furs: the American 1950s preserved in aspic. Returning, jacketless, to the stage, he quipped that “Miss January” had recently reintroduced herself to him in an LA club. “She looked so old,” he joked, pausing for a beat. “Of course I hadn’t changed at all!”

And vocally he hasn’t, for Sedaka’s is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure, the tessitura and timbre as distinctive as ever. The audience would have had him sing all night – and he looked as though he’d have been perfectly able to oblige. Long may he play on, his perfect miniatures bringing joy to our lives. Michael Eavis should book him for Glastonbury.

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Overleaf: Watch Neil Sedaka play a medley of his greatest hits on BBC's The One Show

Caressing the microphone, and gazing into the audience with winsome, soulful sincerity, tousled auburn locks glistening in the stage light, Mads Mathias looks like nothing so much as Ed Sheeran’s more handsome older brother. His voice has the softest of rasps, like being rubbed gently with velvet, and he has his saxophone on hand, as if threatening to shimmer phrases of Sanborn smooth into the night.

In February 1965, Melody Maker asked John Lennon about his personal enthusiasm for Bob Dylan material and Dylan interpretations. “I just felt like going that way,” he said about the new acoustic guitar-based material The Beatles were then recording at Abbey Road.

Every 21st birthday deserves a party, and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester celebrated the anniversary of its opening with a weekend of fun and "access" events, ending with a recital by four pianists on its four Steinway pianos – playing them all at once, in eight-hand arrangements.

Once heard, 1969’s Spirit of the Golden Juice is not forgotten. F. J. McMahon’s sole album is imbued with the heavy air of desolation. Its nine country tinged songs are also melodic and as good as those by Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, with whom McMahon is most often compared. Unlike them, McMahon had not steered a path through the folk circuit to achieve recognition.

This is, in many ways, an underwhelming evening, but the fault does not primarily lie with The Psychedelic Furs. Things start well with support act Lene Lovich who gives a lively performance, in a black’n’red ensemble with striped sleeves and a gigantic, beribboned, plaited wig/hair/hat confabulation which has something of Big Chief Sitting Bull about it. Despite not playing her only Top 10 hit, 1979’s “Lucky Number”, she whoops and theatricalises while her band delivers a suitably punchy new wave racket.

The Psychedelic Furs aren’t going to get away with not playing the hits, especially as this round of gigs is entitled the Singles Tour. The curious thing is that they didn’t really have any big hits. Despite a hefty and deserved reputation, based on their grittily swooning first three albums, and moments from the fourth, they only had two bona fide Top 40 singles. One of these, “Pretty in Pink”, they dispose of early in the set, almost throwing it away. Like Simple Minds with “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, they allegedly have a tricky relationship with the song, due to its Hollywood recontextualisation by writer/director John Hughes (in the 1986 film of the same name: at least The Psychedelic Furs wrote their most famous song; Simple Minds, whose song was used in Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, did not).

All but one band member wear shades throughout - it was ever thus

Ostensibly reformed since the Millennium, this band has not been very active, until now. In concert, they're a six-piece, very much fronted by the two brothers, Richard and Tim Butler, who kickstarted the group during the Seventies punk era, although Sax player Mars Williams is also a big presence, showboating hither and yon. Most members wear hussar-style military coats with lines of closely set brass buttons, although Richard Butler, the frontman, soon takes his off to reveal what appears to be a dotted black pyjama top with white piping around the lapels. All but one band member wear shades throughout. It was ever thus.

Their set runs in the approximate chronological order of their single releases. This is not necessarily a good thing, as they begin with their richest material, cuts such as “Danger”, “Mr Jones” and, especially, “Love My Way”, which closed with a wolfish howl from its singer; then things slowly bog down in later, lesser fare, although they save their other hit, “Heaven”, until the end, before an encore of first album gold. The big problem, though, is the sound.

The Psychedelic Furs’ music is nuanced. It always had a heartfelt, frowning subtlety, with its rock sensibility more in line with Roxy Music or David Bowie than, say, The Damned, and yet the sound from the stage tonight is a smudged, indistinct blur of distortion, with the singing inaudibly fudged way down in the mix. It’s crappy. Putting all my cards on the table, I should mention there are also a few very irritating gig-goers who somewhat spoil my enjoyment. I grow heartily sick of precious, stock still, middle-aged once-were's who regard rock gigs as standardised church ceremonies they’re super-entitled to watch, unhindered by anything lively, social or rock’n’roll.

The Psychedelic Furs appear to be having a ball. Their set-list could do with tweaking but if you say you’re going to play the singles then you have to play the singles! There are rumours of a new album, their first in over a quarter of century, and the band seem invigorated. It bodes well. As for tonight, the difference between what they played and what we heard very much undermined this show.

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Overleaf: watch The Psychedelic Furs perform "Love My Way"

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TV Tube Heart, the debut album from The Radiators From Space, was issued on 21 October 1977, a week before the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. Each was a punk rock album and one, inevitably, has been subjected to greater historical analysis and many more reissues than the other. Of course, Johnny Rotten and co’s first and only long-player was significant but the other band’s album was important too.

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