Like Kevin Rowland, who owes so much to him, the glory of Van Morrison's music has always come more from the power of his delivery than the strength of the compositions.

When he burns, it feels as if he's struggling to hold back a great eruption of emotion, utterly consumed in the freewheeling momentum of the music.

Though the same tropes of old were in evidence on Thursday - the way his voice echoes back on itself, the guttural grunts - that crucial intensity was often sorely lacking.

Drawing mainly from his albums of the past ten years, much of the set was workaday. The earlier numbers in particular were far too Jools Holland for comfort.

Matters improved with the excellent Philosopher's Stone, a straight blues workout on Early In The Morning and a wonderful reclamation of Have I Told You Lately.

We also got That's Life. It takes guts to tackle a song Sinatra made his own, but Morrison's take was a success.

He remains an inscrutable presence, polite but for the most part impassive.

His sax-player was superb, by far the most possessed performer on the stage, lending a lovely flute solo to It's Hard Sometimes. However the rest of the band, like their leader, were rarely more than serviceable.

Fame, Once In A Blue Moon, Back On Top and In The Afternoon all passed by unremarkably, while there was nothing from Astral Weeks, no TB Sheets, no Wild Night, no Moondance, no Here Comes The Night.

It was on the sublime Burning Ground that Morrison's fire returned, while on Brown Eyed Girl, Jackie Wilson Says and Gloria, both he and the audience sparked to life.

It is to be expected that Morrison should refuse the easy pickings of the nostalgia circuit. But it is equally right that we should continue to judge him by his own high standards.

While he seems uneasy with the adulation afforded him, there is an inescapable sense that Morrison has been in the comfort zone for far too long now.

His younger self would have been appalled.