Jarvis Cocker must remember the golden age of pop stars, the pre-punk era of Bowie and Ferry and men from Mars (or Hull) who were beamed down to Earth via Top of the Pops every Thursday. But even shiny young heroes age and have to find another role. Not everyone can model old man’s duds for M&S.

No wonder Cocker seemed so lost when Pulp gradually ground to a halt. He was already in his thirties when he rode Britpop to fame, and his true contemporaries are writing Bafta-winning comedies or presenting chat shows. Music remains a young man’s game. So it really is a pleasure to find that his first solo record can bear comparison with anything he’s produced.

After some recent dabbling in the comedy electro-punk of Relaxed Muscle and songwriting for such icons as Nancy Sinatra and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Cocker has rediscovered his own strengths. With the guitarist Richard Hawley and bassist Steve Mackey, from his former band, he seems revived, while his sardonic wit is as sharp as ever.

The brilliant Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time, Sheffield Spector at its finest, has been retrieved from Nancy Sinatra and rearranged to Cocker’s satisfaction. The tinkling Baby’s Coming Back to Me is now heartbreaking and sarcastic simultaneously. The tense Black Magic very deliberately echoes Crimson and Clover, the Tommy James and the Shondells US chart topper from 1968.

Such a blatant steal is unusual. The beauty here is generally in the details. So the comically evil ballad I Will Kill Again features a piano part reminiscent of Bowie’s Changes.

Morrissey might have enlisted Tony Visconti to add a touch of Starman to his last record, but this is smarter. Hawley is Cocker’s Johnny Marr too. His Velvet Underground-inspired twang sprawls all over the much quoted From A to I as Cocker glumly declares: “They want our way of life, well they can take mine any time they like.”

Maybe it’s a consequence of middle age — he’s now 43 and a father — but Cocker just can’t hide his dismay. He mocks Daily Mail attitudes, yet on the thumping Fat Children (took my life) he sings of how “the parents are the problem/ giving birth to maggots without the sense to become flies”. But adulthood doesn’t have to be negative. On Tonite, the one song that sounds more Hawley than Cocker, he warns his own camp followers that “the night belongs to lovers, so show some respect”.

Cocker retains his empathy with the misfits. The lovely Big Julie (presumably a nod to his reclusive friend Scott Walker’s Big Louise), another song for, and about, one of the outsiders, wriggles with frustrated potential.

His frustration is very adult though, that of a man who can’t believe he’s again seeing the idiocy that he grew up kicking against.

The hidden track Running the World (nasty folk, according to the obscenely catchy chorus) was apparently inspired by the very fact that Live 8 needed to be staged. Plus ça change, as Cocker, now resident in Paris, must surely believe.

STEVE JELBERT