But there was a sense of a larger personality held in check: the broader, more extrovert gestures of the opera house might suit Massis better than the decorum of the recital platform.. One highlight of Randy Newman’s concert was “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It)”, introduced as “a song for us geriatric rockers”. Concerned that no pop stars seem to get around to retiring, Newman put their point of view – “Each record that I’m making/ Is like a record that I’ve made/ Just not as good” – and got us to sing along with the refrain: “You’re dead! You’re dead!” The irony is that by writing the song Newman proves it doesn’t apply to him. One highlight of Randy Newman’s concert was “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It)”, introduced as “a song for us geriatric rockers”. Concerned that no pop stars seem to get around to retiring, Newman put their point of view – “Each record that I’m making/ Is like a record that I’ve made/ Just not as good” – and got us to sing along with the refrain: “You’re dead! You’re dead!” The irony is that by writing the song Newman proves it doesn’t apply to him.
On Tuesday, he played material from throughout his 30-year career. There was “Short People”, the hit that got him in trouble with people who were short on irony.

There was “You Can Leave Your Hat On”, a “love song of a diseased sort” revived recently as a Tom Jones bump’n'grind for The Full Monty. There was “Political Science” and “I Love LA” and “Sail Away” and “My Life Is Good”. There was even “You’ve Got A Friend In Me”, which Newman wrote for Toy Story. What these songs have in common is that they seem on the surface to be straightforward ditties, with no twists and no wordplay, but they can still be shockingly unsettling or wonderfully funny. The audience was rapt for the whole show and gave Newman a standing ovation at the end of it.But none of the evening’s songs was more clever, more beautiful or more disturbing than those from last year’s Bad Love album: the heart-breaking “My Country”; the frighteningly frank tribute to his ex-wife, “I Miss You”; the examination of that oft-overlooked subject for pop songs, 16th-century imperialism, “The Great Nations Of Europe”; and “The World Isn’t Fair”, which notes that Marx’s theories never took into account the ability of rich men “much like me, froggish men, unpleasant to see” to acquire beautiful young wives. I was sorry only that he didn’t perform the whole of Bad Love, from start to finish.It’s almost unique in pop music that a 56-year-old should be recording his strongest material, but Newman is the direct opposite of most “geriatric rockers” in numerous ways. An Oscar-nominated soundtrack composer, he can arrange for an orchestra and he can draw on an extensive knowledge of classical music and jazz.

Yet he always returns to uncomplicated, catchy melodies, and his songs make their point in no more than three or four minutes. Newman’s contemporaries, on the other hand, tend to assert their middle-aged gravitas by abandoning pop tunes in favour of symphonic sprawls they have to pay someone else to orchestrate.If fiftysomething pop stars aren’t trying to reinvent themselves as classical composers, they’re acting as if they’re still snake-hipped teenagers Newman doesn’t. In concert, he sat at a grand piano with a seated audience on one side and the massed ranks of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the other – there simply to add some shading to Newman’s rolling New Orleans honky-tonk piano This formal set-up suited him. Indeed, age suits him to the extent that he repeatedly exaggerates it in his dry cracks between songs: Newman likes to be an old man. The narrators of his songs are often embittered, self-deluding, bigoted fools, and whether they are Newman’s own inner demons or caricatures of other people – he usually leaves that ambiguous – their stories sound more poignant coming from the mouth of a dumpy, grey-haired grouch.

Similarly, that barging, impolite voice of his gets better as it gets worse. On Tuesday, it was a creaky, crumbly, frequently flat sob, and the effect was to add humanity to the misanthropy. “When I wrote this as a kid, I thought it was a joke,” he muttered during “You Can Leave Your Hat On”. “As I get older I take it more seriously.” Newman has grown into his songs, while most other pop stars approaching pensionable age have grown out of theirs.Andreas Johnson’s debut album, Liebling, could have been designed by a team of cunning but slightly out-of-touch advertising executives: it’s almost like the work of a real indie album, but just a little too shiny to be convincing Thursday’s show might have been designed by the same team. The Swede’s band came from central casting – a skinhead drummer, an anonymous keyboard player, a hulking, bearded bassist, and a skinny guitarist who hadn’t seen daylight for months.