Considering that the Verve used David Essex's Rock On as their intro tape, Richard Ashcroft is surely familiar with the tale of Jim Maclaine, the superstar rocker played by Essex in the 1970s. In the films That'll be the Day and Stardust, he traced Maclaine's rise and fall, from working-class rock hero to washed-up casualty, who ditched his band and ended up marooned in egomania. Lately, it has seemed that these films provide an eerie premonition of Ashcroft's own career.

Since the Verve imploded in 1998, his solo steps have become gradually more faltering. Where the Verve trail-blazed from Wigan's backstreets, his Alone with Everybody album has been derided as the work of a cosseted superstar, whose domestic bliss in a £500,000 mansion has resulted in creative sterility. More worryingly for Ashcroft, the album has seriously underperformed, hence two nights at the Apollo, a far cry from the enormous outdoor shows his band played.

An obviously stung Ashcroft declared: "This is for all of you that are still here. Don't believe the hype... I haven't got my pipe and slippers." Then, he delivered a performance full of the passion and anger that typified his rise.

First clad in a designer black leather jacket that resembles a neckbrace, when Ashcroft stripped to a T-shirt it felt like a metaphorical removal of the corporate guff (kitchen-sink productions, flashy videos, industry-only gigs supporting Madonna...) that has surrounded his solo infancy. Although criticism of the album may irk him now, the live renditions prove the reviewers' point. Stripped of their bloated FM sheen, songs such as Brave New World and You're on My Mind sound - more or less - as good as anything he wrote in the Verve.

The set divided into solo songs and solo-penned Verve classics, with the much grumbled-about session musicians taking a low profile as Ashcroft tore his material open. His stark voice found fabulous new poignancy in lines such as "All this talk of getting old..." from Drugs Don't Work. By the end, the entire audience was singing with him, and the encore of History/Bitter Sweet Symphony sounded unearthly and spine-tingling.

His past is still too great a part of his future, and Ashcroft has career decisions to make, but to paraphrase an old Verve hit, he is a Lucky Man - the fire, once again, in his hands.

Richard Ashcroft is at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin (003 531- 677 7124), tomorrow and Thursday, and then tours.