"You would suspect that it may not be worthwhile making Morrissey T-shirts in any size without an L on the label these days. His constituency has grown older with him and most have grown wider. The line stretching round the block looked like, whisper it, a queue at a Deep South burger joint, only with added sensitivity.

The man himself, it should be acknowledged, is in splendid athletic condition, demonstrated by his willingness to hurl his shirt into the audience after every fourth song. The voice,that idiosyncratic blend of warble, croon and bellow, is still in pretty fine shape too, rattling over the dips and swoops of Shakespeare's Sister with as much aplomb as he managed when it came out back in the mid-1980s.

He's preaching to the converted, of course, although there seems to be rather more converted after the recent success of his You Are The Quarry album than around the more difficult period of Southpaw Grammar and Maladjusted. He appears to be enjoying himself as well, which for someone basking in the adoration of a few thousand souls hanging on his every nuance might not seem strange, but is pretty out of the ordinary for Morrissey.

Dressing up your band in kilts and essaying a dodgy Scottish accent would be unforgivable from anybody else, but Morrissey somehow knows he can get away with it. He's confident enough now to throw a few Smiths classics in with the material from the solo albums. Starting off the show with How Soon Is Now is setting the bar audaciously high though, and at times he struggles to get back up there. It is broadly true to say that he can no longer match the songwriting of that perfect stretch from 1982 to 1987. At least not consistently: the sublime Now My Heart Is Full is one of his finest songs, while Come Back To Camden from the new record is as subtle and sensititve a ballad as he's ever wrought, and a touch too tender to play live. Instead we get the swaggering but two-dimensional stompers First Of The Gang To Die and I Like You.

"This next song will test you patience", he promises, and he's not wrong. You Know I Couldn't Last is a misguided gripe about the squabbles he has had with critics, an uncharitable swipe at former colleagues, a sneer at those who dismissed him. It's a lumbering graceless work, and you wish he still had someone close enough to tell him that lines such as "Your royalties bring you luxuries" are hardly designed to recreate the effortless empathy he used to have with his followers.

Of course we'll never get back there. Too much water has flowed under those iron bridges he used to sing about. The last time I saw The Smiths in Edinburgh was the spring of 1984 and, 20 years on, it's apparent that with his sweat-shop band pounding away and Morrissey a little leaden he could never recapture the magical grace of his first group.

Sometimes revisiting their catalogue does him no favours. So we get Rubber Ring, thrown away as a b-side in the fecund days of The Smiths, but a highlight here, it's sinuous melodyweaving in and around a lyric that was as close as he's come to anthemic. There's a real pathos in the line "Do you love me like you used to?" because he probably knows we don't and can't.

He gave us a lacklustre There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and it rang half-true. Morrissey's light is gradually dimming, flickering with moments of brief brilliance. Then we took our double-decker buses back to the suburbs, until next time."