Camden’s historic countercultural hotbed, the Roundhouse, reopened in 2006 with a stack of concrete bars, holding areas and walkways appended to its tubby body like those glaringly modern visitor centres attached to ancient remains at World Heritage Sites. Crossing the metal bridge from the brightly lit 21st-century annexe into the darkness of the 19th-century engine house, we leave our humdrum modern lives behind as we prepare to view another ancient monument of a distant age: Morissey, exiled king of the fabled land of 1980s indie rock.

Morrissey is condemned to live in the shadow of the Smiths, the band who saved the lives of thousands of bedsit depressives, yet his 2004 solo album You Are the Quarry surpasses any Smiths album, and the one Smiths show I saw was an oddly underwhelming Midlands stop on the Meat Is Murder tour, when sausages were thrown in Morrissey’s unhappy face by loutish wags. Tonight, middle-aged men and a healthy smattering of new fans chant Morrissey’s name, football-crowd-style, without a sausage in sight. At 9pm exactly, a screen drops to reveal their idol and his five-piece band, styled in tight denim suits, like the capering prisoners of Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock. In the slack world of rock’n’roll, even his punctuality seems subversive.

Last year, after waxing nostalgically about the England he grew up in, he was accused of racism by the NME, and subsequently filed alongside Pound, Eliot, Larkin and other right-of-centre artists by The Daily Telegraph’s pop critic. But Morrissey, by artistic necessity the eternal outsider, at least has some new tormentors to kick against. “Apparently,” he says, “my name is trouble.” The group launch into How Soon Is Now, the first of four Smiths numbers. It’s a bequiffed, slow-motion throb that ends with Morrissey prostrate to the clattering of a ludicrous Spinal Tap dinner gong. He is one of the few performers left to radiate the aloof, old-fashioned star quality that entitles him to indulge in such theatrics.

The love in the room is overwhelming, yet Morrissey’s between-song banter becomes more apologetic and less confident as the evening progresses. The back catalogue is trawled, in anticipation of a forthcoming greatest-hits album, but surprises include an obscure, and rather wonderful, Smiths B-side, Stretch Out and Wait, and a defiant National Front Disco, a stomping depiction of a family losing their son to the far right. Its uncomfortable refrain of “England for the English” reminds us, provocatively, that writing about an unsavoury view is not the same as endorsing it. New songs – That’s How People Grow Up, Something Is Squeezing My Skull, I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris – draw on glam-rock power chords and skiffle beats, familiar stylistic platforms for Morrissey’s bitterly defeated romanticism. Long-term lieutenant Boz Borer and the band move into forestage phalanxes of flailing guitars that self-consciously echo classic rock iconography, and the multi-instrumentalist Chris Pooley adds textures that sometimes seem perilously experimental.

Morrissey works the room, at one point shamelessly crouched in a spotlight with his back to us while Pooley extends the descending riff of an extended fade into a moment of melodrama that tugs the heartstrings, for all its forced theatricality. If Morrissey’s self-absorbed sadness is really an act, then it’s an act that works brilliantly. He closes, bare-chested, with a knowing and valedictory The Last of the Famous International Playboys, like a battered prizefighter holding aloft a hard-won trophy that he has no intention whatsoever of surrendering.

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