"I'm pretty nervous. I've forgotten how to play everything," Jamie Treays, AKA Jamie T, told a radio interviewer recently, ahead of this long-awaited live return in an intimate venue. He needn't have worried. With the crowd chanting "Jamie T! Jamie T!" and audience members crowdsurfing, the atmosphere crackles with the sort of energy you imagine was present when the Clash played the Roxy or at the birth of rock'n'roll itself. Meanwhile, the sweat-soaked, cherubic 28-year-old on stage looks as if he can't believe how exciting it all is, and is wondering why he ever stopped doing it in the first place.
The last time Treays released an album, 2009's rave-reviewed Kings and Queens, Labour were in government and David Beckham played for England. Back then, Jamie T was the Mercury-nominated, top 10-hugging MC whose uniquely ramshackle mix of punk, rap, two-tone and John Betjeman – with rapid-fire tales of love, drugs, death and drunken characters called Stella and daft Smack Jack the Cracker Man – found an umbilical connection with twentysomethings, who felt he sang their lives.
His rocketing trajectory, however, was abruptly knocked sideways by personal crises. Songs from forthcoming album Carry on the Grudge sound like the result of long, possibly liquid afternoons contemplating the meaning of it all. Treays is certainly singing more than rapping now, and his words pack a darker, more fatalistic energy. In the string-soaked They Told Me It Rained, he traces life's passage from "birth cries to death wails" with some eye-opening lyrics: "Soaked-through sheets. She didn't die quite right."
It's haunting stuff, but the mood of the gig is anything but downbeat as even melancholy comeback single Don't You Find – a Police-type skank – is sung noisily back at him. The crowd choir even find their way around such tongue-twisters as The Man's Machine's
"I'm a dragnet right on through the city of sin / It's the hard-done bastards taking it in / Well, I see what I say, save it on the way / They can't sit bawling but they're bawling away."
The hour-long set avoids almost all his old big hits but is paced just right to maintain the fever pitch. By the time Mr T is manically grinning through Sticks and Stones and young men are forgetting themselves enough to clamber up on the stage to hug and kiss him, this feels like the triumphant return of a modern original.
