Arriving on the stage at the Manchester Opera House for his first British dates in 15 years, Leonard Cohen immediately apologised for “putting some of you to such geographic and financial inconvenience”.

He had a point: the £75 tickets were a bit pricey, even by modern standards, and the fact that Cohen is playing only a handful of dates in Manchester, Edinburgh and London, and a headlining slot at Glastonbury, won’t have made life easy for his fans in, say, Norwich or Aberdeen.

Still, you couldn’t help feeling that the person who had probably been most inconvenienced by Leonard Cohen’s 2008 world tour was Cohen himself. After winding down his concert work in 1996, he went to live in a Zen Buddhist retreat in California for five years, but his plans to spend his old age mulling over koans and making the odd record with nubile playmates such as his latest, Anjani Thomas, had drastically to be revised in 2005, when it emerged that he had been swindled out of his $5m retirement nest egg by his former manager, Kelley Lynch.

And so it came to pass that, three years later, rock’s oldest living legend — 74 this year — has embarked on what will almost certainly be the last tour of his remarkable career.

Not that he showed any signs of frailty or ennui during last Tuesday’s three-hour show. He frequently adopted the Cohen Crouch — a crumpled, knock-kneed stance in which he appeared to be singing into his shirt. And his growl of a voice had lost none of its subterranean accuracy, pitching at depths that most people barely recognise as notes. His concern for the wellbeing of his three female backing singers — whom he sidled over to and introduced by name at every opportunity — suggested that the death of this notorious ladies’ man is still some way off. It was delightful, too, to watch Cohen basking in the adoration of the crowd, greeting their delirious applause with elaborate old-fashioned thank-yous for “your kind attention” or — even more bizarrely, given what they’d paid for their seats — “your hospitality”.

Dressed in a plain grey suit and a fedora, which he kept removing, holding to his chest or waving around to tremendous theatrical effect, Cohen led his nine-piece band through a recital of 24 of his best-known songs. They ranged evenly across his 40 years as a recording artist, from the earnest love ballads he favoured in his youth, such as That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, to the more witty and sardonic style he perfected in his later years, of which the most effective on the night was Closing Time, a faux-country evocation of a drunkenly lascivious scene in a small-town bar.

The biggest cheer of the evening was reserved for Hallelujah, the song that has become Cohen’s signature in recent years, and which topped the US iTunes chart earlier this year after it was performed by a contestants on the television talent show American Idol.

The revelation of the concert wasn’t so much the music, beautifully performed as it was by a lightly amplified band who never put a foot wrong, but the persona of the man himself. Age hasn’t so much mellowed Cohen as made him much, much funnier. It's hard to credit that this twinkly-eyed old jester, who reminded us at one point that “the last time I was here, I was just a 60-year-old kid with a crazy dream”, used, not so long ago, to be regarded as a depressive. How could we have carried on thinking such a thing about the author of this line from Democracy: “I’m stubborn as those garbage bags that time will not decay”?

Well, bin that. As Cohen returned for his third encore and launched into I Tried to Leave You, the auditorium erupted with mirth. Like all the best comics, the man who used to be mockingly referred to as “Laughing Len” kept a meticulously straight face throughout, thanked us again for our kind attention, replaced the fedora and wandered contentedly off.

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