What does a queue for Cat Stevens’s first show in 30 years look like?

Pretty much as you would expect it to, given everything that has happened to him in his adult life: baby-boomers for whom Tea for the Tillerman was something of a set text; and scattered among them a sizeable contingent of Muslim fans — the men distinguished (as the singer is these days) by long beards and functional, loose-fitting clothes.

Whatever he calls himself now, no one would have disputed the spoken introduction that described him as “an icon for a whole generation of searchers” — no one, perhaps, but Yusuf himself, who at times seemed unsure what to do with the affection that greeted his arrival.

Perhaps he had forgotten just how extraordinary it is to his fans that the innately melancholy grain of his voice remains unchanged.

After fluffing the beginning of In the End, he seemed genuinely concerned that the audience of invited guests and competition winners might mind him doing it again.

Though it would have taken an almighty curmudgeon to begrudge him, there was no escaping that this and many songs from his recent An Other Cup album lacked the sense of movement and unresolved tension common to his older numbers.

A case in point was 1970’s Where Do the Children Play? He played it twice because sometimes that’s what you have to do with shows being televised for BBC Four and, if anything, it was even better the second time — his ten-piece band dispersing a young man’s anxieties into the air like an unexpected storm.

More to the point, the song made demands of his voice that were absent in more recent songs.

Backing vocalists and extra guitarists attempted to make themselves useful on Midday and Maybe There’s A World. They would have been better off leaving the stage — bedecked, for some reason, like a Moroccan café — and allowing for a little more intimacy. When they had something to do, however, it was an altogether different story. Of the new songs, I Think I See the Light was inarguably wonderful — its assertive piano motif drawing hitherto unheard rhythm and blues depths from its 59-year-old creator.

Earlier on, when introducing Don’t Be Shy, he talked about songs that make you “see the pages of the past in a new light”. If anything, it was an observation that became even more apparent as he began strumming the chords to Father & Son.

After 30 years away from the public eye, Yusuf’s role in the song has switched. Singing lines such as “Look at me/ I am old but I’m happy”, he treated the song with a gratitude befitting of a gift from his younger self.

Surely there wasn’t a person in the room who could have foreseen how moving that moment would be.

Good for Yusuf that his journey should have taken him to this point. But as he said his final thank-you, we wondered if the unfathomably complex, sometimes unforgiving, largely secular world that Yusuf has left behind doesn’t also have the best tunes.

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