As his recent involvement in projects such as Africa Express and Monkey: Journey to the West show, these days Damon Albarn is something of a global villager. However, it is his relationship with London that continues to inspire some of his most soulful work. And come the end of the year, it’ll be the Good the Bad & the Queen – Albarn’s brooding love letter to his adoptive hometown – that will propel him into 2007’s Best lists.

That said, it has taken a while for the group to find their feet as a live entity. A high-profile debut at the Roundhouse was hampered by the audience’s lack of familiarity with the songs and the fact that the group’s on-stage chemistry had yet to assert itself. Eight months later, though, there was no mistaking the relish with which they took to the job. With Paul Simonon sketching out a lithe dub through a theremin-abetted Kingdom of Doom, a Fagin-stooped Albarn gazed from his piano at a view that took in a gleaming Gherkin and the Tower of London. Of the latter, he said: “This place has a lot to answer for, but . . .” He couldn’t find the words to finish off the thought, although the music did it for him.

Albarn writes about London like a future historian might, lacing his words with an affecting melancholy. “Oceanographers are charting the rise of the sea,” he sang on Nature Springs, as though the words had been found on a scrap of paper after some great flood. To his left, a choir added dissonant portent to the mix while the top-hatted female string quartet played with the sort of inappropriate jollity that made you think of the Titanic house band.

“This is about the whale that swam just over there,” said Albarn introducing A Northern Whale – the song about the ill-fated mammal that captured London’s imagination last year. The cumulative effect of these songs – apocalyptic and yet oddly Dickensian – was to cause greater consternation about changing times than Live Earth managed to do in eight hours.

For all the epithets recently lavished upon Albarn, few think of him as a folk singer. But in every sense that matters, that’s precisely what he is. To borrow his own words on History Song, “If you don’t know it now, then you will do.”

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