Two attractive young ladies swing from the Tube handrail looking distracted and bored as somehow only attractive young ladies can. A scruffy row of buttoned-down, 50-something commuters eye them carelessly, up and down and once more back up again for good measure, as if emboldened by their indifference. I feel vaguely repulsed by their ogling, then I remember where I’m going and it doesn't seem so bad.

I’m going to watch four men’s mid-life crisis take place on a stage in Kentish Town. And I’m rather looking forward to it. Rock ‘n’ roll is traditionally the preserve of the angry young yoof, of course, but Grinderman lash out at the foibles of middle age with the viciousness of an ageing lion stamping out his territory over would-be pretenders to his crown.

The band strikes up the flyblown opening bars of ‘Grinderman’, and Nick Cave makes his suitably grand entrance, his theatrical vibrato wrapping tenebrous fingers round the crimson-hued throat of the Forum venue, guitar squealing its plangent discontent.

Then it’s on to the rallying cry, the manifesto, and it’s greeted like the reading of a cherished bedtime story from a melodramatic uncle. Cave attacks the role with snarling gusto, changing the words a little: “I gotta get up to get down, I gotta confront a general gentrification of the heart”. His spindly pointed finger casts a long, dancing shadow on the wall as he swoops magnificently upon his audience. They reach out to touch their idol, but you wonder if sometimes he doesn’t pray inwardly for someone to hit him square in the face, just to help him reconnect with his pugilistic past. No-one would have the balls, of course. But if his modus operandi as a bar-brawling loverman might have been played out years ago, it’s still undeniably a blast seeing him gamely garble his way through a biting set of unreconstructed rock catharsis. “I called her honey bee, I called her LEEERRVE, but she just still didn't want to - she just never wants to... DAMN!” He spits the lines disgustedly during ‘No Pussy Blues’, his frustrated desires blinding him to the obvious irony that absolutely everybody wants to, with big goth-shaped bells on.

‘Go Tell The Women’ revisits the lounge noir of ‘Red Right Hand’, the eccentrically-bearded Warren Ellis plucking at his fiddle like a feral extra from The Proposition. Then he switches to guitar and really cuts loose on ‘(I Don’t Want You To) Set Me Free’, steering the song deftly away from its stodgy funk underpinnings and joining in a rambunctious chorus that sounds like a choir of lairy professors. ‘When My Love Comes Down’ is sluggish and insolent, spiked with stroppy outbursts of guitar and violin that lash out like a wounded animal. On ‘Electric Alice’ Cave sways imperiously over his keyboard like he’s riding out some black wave of despair.

He starts out the sinister, suited gentlemen of his latter-day Bad Seeds tenure and winds up the gobbing, shirt-buttoned-down-to-his-pubes wildman of yesteryear. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, he seems most in his element when gloating about how “the kids aren’t singing anymore” during a crowd-thinning encore of ‘Harlem’ with lunatic support act Suicide. Try as he might, Cave can’t buy that kind of divisive appeal anymore.

He’s just too darned loveable.