Reading an interview with Ray Davies in this month's Uncut I was struck by his comments about how he often thinks of himself as nothing, as a void in which listeners can find space when they listen to his music. He seemed to be saying that the great songs and the great musicians (the great artists even: he namechecks Shakepseare in this context) have an uncanny ability to allow their listeners to fill in details themselves, to imprint their own ego onto the work of the artist. I wondered if this was the reason why the music I listened to in my most impressionable age range (6-17) is the material that still feels a part of me whereas all music since those salad days feels more like an echo from that key period in my life, still strong but only a reflection of the original sounds that captivated me and therefore a lesser part of me.

Band On The Run is one of the albums from that unique period that stays with me. In fact it soundtracked our summer holiday this year with the eldest Bisto daughter hearing it for the first time at about the same age I did. Every now and then as the Bisto family frollicked on the beach or trotted in the hills we'd hear her singing snippets "Let me roll it to YER....JET ooh ooh woo ooh wooo.....and you'll know what love is for.....DRINK TO ME". The album is near-perfect, accessible and immediate but somehow it still offers new persepectives on what makes music ticks the boxes. Or is it that, in the light of Ray Davies' comments about what makes great music, it is an album that has me ticking boxes about myself, the album soundtracking a review of my life through a sonic prism that allows my older self to reach back to my younger self to see if we're still one and the same person?

Macca, Sir Paul McCartney, The Walrus, plain Paul, has always struck me as a blank canvas musician who lets the listener add colour and contrast to complete his music and on Later last night he did nothing to dispel that notion. He is not the force of nature that John was and in many respects that Ringo and George were. You think of John and you think of an Agitant, you think of George and you think of a Hippy, you think of Ringo and you think of a Cartoon. But Paul?

In fact, Paul seems to have adopted a dress style (think Jamie Cullum's grandad) that allows him to blend in, makes him simply one of the band which, in the context of the song Band On The Run, seems very apt. His band ended the show with that song but kicked off Later with Jet, a track that could probably just as easily have been called Bett or Pet or even Vet but by being called what it is gives just enough personality to its protagonist (not too much or you leave nothing to the listener's imagination) to elevate it to that stratospheric level of instant classic. The final song title was probably derived from his playing around with the word suffragette (although Paul sings it as sufferer-jet) and yet, Jet is an everyman kind of a classic song, a song that could still be sung as Bett, Pet or Vet and not lose the essence of what it is.

Paul's band is great. They're like a pub band with stadium credentials. They rock and roll, they play as a band and not as a supporting cast of musicians in thrall to their leader and they are helped in that regard by Paul himself, looking content to immerse his ego and his songs in a group dynamic, letting the others add their own personalities to a body of work he can call upon from 50 years of song-writing. It's great to see a hero of mine playing as if he's only as good as his last gig.

Aloe Blacc offered a time-warp moment with his soul revue review of music for a modern credit crunching depression. His background is MCing and hip hop (the tell-tale signs are there in the rhythm) but I Need A Dollar is a full blown attempt at making soul music in a classic mould. Interestingly, like those Blaxploitation tracks of the 70s it musically and lyrically references, his song soundtracks an HBO TV series. Aloe looked the part as well as he shuffled about the stage in a natty shirt and tie and trousers that my wife unduly concerned herself with as maybe being a bit too tight.

Neil Diamond has the unfortunate look of a man constantly smirking at a joke made at someone else's expense. My next door neighbour is a massive fan of his work but he's never been more to me than part of the neighbourhood in which I listen to music. In other words I've heard him enough times to know who he is and what he's done but have never felt like making more than a passing aquaintance. I enjoyed his chat with Jools as he seemed sharp and on the ball (his comment about sharing their birthday apart was very funny). His performance of I'm A Believer was...nice. But in opting for a reverential approach to a song of his made famous by The Monkees he was in stark contrast to Paul, a man who seems to be looking for a way to make his music relevant to him today as much as to anyone out there listening. Cosy, warm and familiar is what you expect musicians of Diamond's age to do and in that respect he didn't disappoint. But it was disappointing nonetheless.

On the other hand The Black Keys did impress. I love drummers who play the drums in the belief that they are the lead guitarist, that they are the main event and not the instruments that carry the tune. There is a school of thought that a band loses more when it loses its drummer than if it lost any other of its musicians and nowhere would this be more true that with The Black Keys. The fact that Patrick Carney looks as though he should be completing some mathematical conundrum at MIT only adds to the mystique. But that said, isn't it great to hear an electric guitar sound so "unproduced" as Dan Auerbach's does? I could listen to that sound all day.

I've not heard Elvis Costello's new album and, like many on here, he's a musician I've fallen out of love with in recent years. But I'm more than interested in him after last night's performance for one very simple reason: I struggled to make head or tail of what the hell he was doing musically. Rewind to 1982 and I'm about to play Imperial Bedroom. It starts with a track called Beyond Belief and I'm struggling to get into it. Where does the verse end and the chorus begin? Why does it sound like 3 different songs and not one? Is he just being clever and contrary for the sake of it? A Slow Drag With Josephine had the same effect on me. Elvis looked jittery and distracted, grappling with himself to make his song work in the setting of the Later studio but he also looked like a man with a musical purpose, revitalised and reconnected with his own past.

There is a rationale for playing your music as if it's part of a Heritage Trail by the simple fact that you and your music has a known and recognisable history, ostensibly because you and your music has been a fixture in our minds for so long. Take a Trail like that with your audience and there's gold in them thar hills. But as last night's Later showed there are different ways of walking that Trail without making Later the musical equivalent of The Antiques Roadshow. I enjoy reconnecting with music from my past and watching performers today "do the hits" but I want to believe that the best days are still ahead of me. So it's envigorating to watch performers approaching their art in the same way, to see them changing the palette and working with different materials, sometimes unsuccessfully, but trying to justify themselves when in all honesty they don't really need to try anymore.