Ray Davies
Southampton Guildhall

On taking to the stage, most decent rock performers try to prove that they are not just like everybody else. Former Kinks frontman Ray Davies achieves this by stalking on alone with his guitar to sing 'I'm Not like Everybody Else'. As an opening declaration, this stormy 1966 B-side - which has some claims to being the first punk anthem - certainly takes some beating. The three-piece backing band joining him halfway through are slightly hindered by their ability to play their instruments properly (the Kinks never did finesse), but this is still recognisably rebel music.

The proud isolation of this English songwriting lodestar has sometimes seemed like a mixed blessing. One of the awkward and prickly figures who established British rock's credentials for awkwardness and prickliness, Davies has often been overshadowed by his peers. In the mid-Nineties, he stopped making music altogether. But now a debut solo debut EP called The Tourist coincides with his first tour featuring a band not called the Kinks. An album, Other People's Lives, arrives early next year.

This isn't the only reason he has been in the news; Davies recently emerged as perhaps the least likely media authority on the New Orleans flood. In 2000, the notorious Little Englander undertook an inspirational tour of the Mississippi. Finally renting a home in the city, he even started community projects in his new, mainly black neighbourhood. Then, in January 2004, he experienced the area's downside when a bag-snatcher shot him in the leg. The wound became infected and he was bedridden for months.

It doesn't take long for recent events to impinge: third song 'After the Fall' stoically exalts in recovering from personal collapse. 'It's about trying to find your feet,' he tells us. 'We've all had that problem, haven't we?' Oddly, he notes afterwards, the song was written four years ago. He almost seems pleased with its prescience in predicting calamity for both himself and his adoptive city.

Bounding, even leaping around the stage, in baggy shirt and drainpipes, the 61-year-old now looks and sounds in fine form. Following his spoken-word tours in the late-Nineties, tonight's show is also peppered with warmly personal tributes, anecdotes and explication. His easy command over the Kinks' songbook only occasionally falters. The honeyed decadence of 'Sunny Afternoon' is irresistible; the pathos of 'Autumn Almanac', about an island nation staving off the cold with football and tea, drains away in a sloppy singalong.

The new material sees Davies's observations, as ever, veering between perfect and plainly puzzling. 'Stand-Up Comic' is a cranky, theatrical sprawl, in which Davies plays a drunken, spivvy comedian whose audience hoots at his crass insults and swearing. In the midsection, he momentarily disappears while guitarist Mark Jones produces waves of ominous feedback. Returning to evoke the comic's existential hangover the next day, Davies groans: 'The reality bites, the morality kicks in.' Who can say? Maybe he had a bad night at Jongleurs.

More steadily, his dark New Orleans odyssey 'The Tourist' (again, written before the shooting) pictures moneyed white folk slumming it around others' misery; as the sounds of sirens and urban grime boom around the hall, it feels we are experiencing some kind of catharsis.

'All Day and All of the Night' is dedicated to Ray's younger brother Dave, the turbulent Kinks guitarist who recently suffered his own fall: a stroke in June 2004 (he is reportedly recovering well). Recalling one record company exec sniffily comparing his guitar sound to a barking dog, Ray suggests: 'But what a dog ... and what a bark!'

In the encore, he explains 'Waterloo Sunset' is for the 'lonely people'; a point lost in the Britpop street-party, this 1967 treasure was all about feeling isolated from the throng. Davies's England obsession, like those of Morrissey and Philip Larkin, was always connected to a search for emotional peace. 'Don't worry, it'll be all right,' he offers to the audience.

As the band departs, the PA appropriately plays Fats Domino's 'Walking to New Orleans'. Still an engagingly vulnerable presence, Ray Davies has definitely found the road to recovery.

· Ray Davies plays Oxford's New Theatre tonight, and Bridgewater Hall, Manchester on Friday