Gig review: Edwyn Collins at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

“If you didn’t notice,” Edwyn Collins intones after the Costello-esque shimmer-wash of his opener The Campaign for Real Rock, “I f***ed up there.” Genial laughs ring around from his band and audience; the star himself cackles twice and sports a grin.

Few shows this autumn will see such a naked swell of goodwill and affection for its star. Across the length of a four-and-a-half-decade career, the Dundee-raised musician has emerged as an influential cult favourite, the Orange Juice frontman-turned-solo star-turned-indie producer with an ear for melodic melancholy and piquant prose.

Yet it remains a minor miracle that he figures here at all; two cerebral haemorrhages in 2005, in his own words, seemed to signal that it was “curtains”, leaving him with a lengthy rehabilitation to even speak, let along sing and tour again.

The effects still live with Collins, which surely has played into his call to quit the road; this show comes as part of his farewell run, a pared-down intimate warm-up. With his band tucked neatly across the boxy corners of the Brudenell Social Club’s main room, and the star himself perched on a chair, the result carries the air of the world’s fondest retirement party; a lively love-in built on buoyant jangle-pop melodies and with a crowd keenly enamoured with its headline attraction.

Backed by a projector with his name in Elvis-style lightbulbs, this hundred-minute affair splits the difference between his catalogues effectively down the middle, with a healthy dose of Gorgeous George, his most successful record. Each song proves boisterously received; the bucolic swish of Dying Day, the lively rhythms behind I Can’t Help Myself. At one point, his struggles to speak require a restart of Make Me Feel Again – and he proceeds to wallop through with twice as much emotion to boot.

A lovely moment comes towards the halfway point when Collins brings up his son William for an affecting duet through In Your Eyes, underpinned by new-wave pulses and raw emotion, while he also takes time out to praise the venue’s broad selection of pies in a delightfully idiosyncratic anecdote.

Yet he knows where the biggest responses lie – and after a bright funk rumble through Rip It Up, stands from his perch to bellow the thrilling alt-glam rumble of A Girl Like You with rapturous applause.

“I’m so ancient,” he cracks. “But I made it.” It is an unfettered, heartwarming triumph.