HENRY PRIESTMAN may have mellowed from an angry young man into a mildly grumpy old git but what has not diminished in time is his ability as a tunesmith and songwriter.

Henry can often be found these days performing intimate private gigs in fans’ homes; well, the parlour came to the hollowed-out wedding cake arena that is home to John Drummond’s Brewery Blues in Cirencester on Friday, when Priestman gave a good humoured masterclass of his songwriting craft accompanied by brother in banter, guitarist Les Glover.

He could easily have filled the gig with a string of hits from his 80s and 90s smooth Liverpool soul output with The Christians – he did unleash the memorable duo Ideal World and Forgotten Town – but this was a showcase for material from the unlikely coda to his career.

In 2009, after earning a living in the world of advertising jingles and soundtracks, a 53-year-old Henry recorded his first solo record – The Chronicles Of Modern Life. It was a belter and this year he had no option but to release a new album, The Last Mad Surge Of Youth – another cracker.

Such is the strength of his fresh material that in a 100-minute set he could even afford to leave out fine new songs like The Idiot and The Sacred Scrolls Of Pop.

What we did get were concise, three-and-a-half minute reflections on the ageing process in all its guises, put over with simple universal truths and trademark killer choruses, the sort that set Priestman and the other giants of pop apart.

Subjects include the newly-redundant (Don’t You Love Me No More); modern office politics (It’s Called A Heart); your daughter’s latest boyfriend (He Ain’t Good Enough For You); his mother’s death (At The End Of The Day), kids leaving home (We Used To Be You) and the self explanatory Old and Grey’s The New Blonde.

Then there is True Believer – a potential lighters’ aloft arena filler – while love gets a look in with Valentine Song, which has been made into a lump-in-the-throat short film by Ridley Scott productions called ‘Cupidity’.

If Bowie can win a Brit at 67 there may yet be an Ivor Novello in Priestman as he morphs into a poster boy for U3A.

Napster has Henry’s work filed under the genre ‘Classical’ and for this unsung artist who began writing ‘when petrol was cheap’, that is not as daft as it seems.