IT IS said that everyone gets the face they deserve in middle age, which may explain why 45-year-old Steven Patrick Morrissey began 2004 looking like a washed-up nightclub bouncer who had spent half a decade nursing a bitter persecution complex in his Hollywood exile.

As the year closes, however, with sales of his comeback album, You Are The Quarry, nearing one million and a fresh army of young fans enthralled by his waspish wit, the former Smiths frontman appeared buoyant and revitalised as he launched his latest British mini-tour dressed as a vicar. With the festive season looming, Morrissey finally unleashed his inner drag queen in Glasgow.

First, though, came a 50-minute blast of alien glamour and nail-scraping intensity from Polly Harvey. Wrapped in a blinding scarlet mini-dress, Harvey role-played a gallery of howling banshees and psychotic sirens while her three-piece band strummed and scoured a freeform swamp-blues racket. A careening Big Exit emerged from this cacophony red in tooth and claw, but other superior tracks, such as 50ft Queenie, simply drowned in sonic slurry. The intent was commendably offbeat but the effect largely underwhelming.

Once again Morrissey performed in front of giant illuminated letters proclaiming his name with an old-school Las Vegas swagger. As ever, this overblown presentation appeared both supremely ironic and gloriously egocentric, a balancing act that has long been the singer’s forte. Much of the set was culled from his new album, peppered with well- chosen B-sides and even a jaunty cover version of Patti Smith’s cheerfully macabre Redondo Beach.

Morrissey was in fine voice for most of the set, with singalong highlights provided by his two recent hit singles, First of the Gang to Die and Irish Blood English Heart. Tellingly, both were received more rapturously than any old Smiths tune. The past really is a foreign country to his new fans.

For those of us who were scarred for ever by loving the Smiths in our adolescence, Morrissey’s return to almost great form is a mixed blessing. It was tantalising to hear archive gems including Bigmouth Strikes Again and Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me in Glasgow, but the workmanlike trudges through such all-time classics as How Soon is Now? and There Is a Light that Never Goes Out amounted to little short of vandalism.

Indeed, he may have spruced up his sound with keyboards and brass but Morrissey sometimes still trundles where he should soar. A real sense of drama is required, after all, to remain Britpop’s greatest living drama queen.

Minor niggles aside, the original Mancunian Candidate proved once again in Glasgow that true pop stars possess a rarefied, sharp-witted charisma that never really fades. Like fine wines, they simply grow more rich and fruity with age.

• Tour details: Brighton Centre, December 17; Earls Court, London, December 18

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