Roger Waters once described A Momentary Lapse of Reason - the first Pink Floyd album to be recorded after he had left the group - as a “clever forgery”. Ironically, it was this rather ungracious phrase that came to mind as the 64-year-old singer and bass player returned to London at the helm of what was a superb Pink Floyd show in almost every detail but for the absence of Pink Floyd.

There were searing blasts of pyrotechnics, thunderous sound effects ricocheting around a “360 degree” speaker system and a giant inflatable pig (now radio controlled, apparently) floating above the audience. Grand cinematic visions of interstellar landscapes and cosmic debris accompanied numbers that included Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Have a Cigar and Wish You Were Here. And this was all before Waters and his ten- piece band even got started on the centrepiece of the event: a rigorously accurate performance in its entirety of Dark Side of the Moon.

Waters began touring this show in June 2006, and the O2 Arena presentation was essentially the same as the one he put on in Hyde Park that year. Having taken it around the world since then, the man who has taken to billing himself as “the creative genius of Pink Floyd” has clearly gone a long way towards reclaiming custody of these songs.

And what a magnificent body of work it still is. With the aid of some crack musicians, including three guitarists who between them just about covered for David Gilmour, Waters returned to a well-trodden path with all the considerable authority and world-weary passion at his disposal. Clocks chimed at the start of Time; the cash registers rang out at the start of Money; trains screeched and a column of commuters trudged to work during Us and Them; and during Brain Damage, brains floated out of soma capsules. While such imagery was stark and simple, the performance was Wagnerian in scale and timeless in its appeal.

If the show was primarily an archaeological dig, the treasures unearthed were real enough. Only a couple of Waters's solo songs made the cut: a bombastic Perfect Sense, during which an inflatable astronaut drifted over the crowd, together with one “newish” piece called Leaving Beirut, an unbelievably clumsy and condescending cultural polemic which stuck out in the concert like an unfortunate stain on the carpet.

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