Smile and the world smiles with you. Frown and the world just keeps on smiling, provided you are Adam Duritz, the Counting Crows singer, who has made a career out of transforming a morbid self-absorption into songs of strangely life-affirming beauty.

The San Francisco band’s relationship with London goes back 15 years, to when they first played at the Borderline. Now they routinely perform at Wembley, yet still seem to exist in a cult bubble, well removed from the modern mainstream.

They are not a heritage act and managed to ignore pretty much anything that smacked of a “greatest hit”. Yet they only mustered three songs from their most recent album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, an epic study in the emotional mechanics of debauchery and redemption, released last year. The first of these, a full-on rocker called Cowboys, wrested so much effort and feeling from Duritz, 44, that the singer was literally floored, and remained flat on his back for some time at the end of it.

As the set progressed, Duritz presented a portrait of the artist on the verge of an emotional meltdown on numbers including A Murder of One and Speedway, the latter prompting a tirade of highly personal abuse about the ex-girlfriend who inspired the song. Never mind Morrissey, this man is truly the king of pain.

Earlier, the Hold Steady, from New York, performed a superlative set of storytelling rock’n’roll that began with Positive Jam, a song incorporating a potted history of the 20th century, and reached a climax with the rallying cry of Stay Positive. That’s a lot of positivity from a band that in between travelled to some dark and dangerous corners of the American psyche, courtesy of the brilliant, poetic lyrics of the singer Craig Finn.

The Hold Steady returned to the stage, along with the other support group, Blind Pilot, towards the end of Counting Crows’ set, and everyone threw themselves into a version of Rain King that incorporated a verse or two of With a Little Help from My Friends. It was a remarkably upbeat finale to a show that ventured into some dark corners of the soul.

Tour continues at BIC, Bournemouth, tonight; Royal Centre, Nottingham, tomorrow; Brixton Academy, SW9, Thursday; Brighton Centre, May 24; Sheffield Academy, May 26; Newcastle Academy, May 27 (www.countingcrows.com)

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