Everclear rocks The Cambridge with vintage punk and pop

Even in his most boisterous moments, through thrusts of intensity that thrilled the 600 or so Everclear fans at the Cambridge Hotel on Sunday night, frontman Art Alexakis always sang like a man with bigger things on his mind. As always, his seasoned brand of nonchalance, that tattered badge of rebellion that only punk rockers in their 60s ever get to wear, was brandished with a kind of reckless pride. If he wasn't just dressed in a singlet, he would have worn it on his sleeve.

Yet in his final show at the Cambridge Hotel, a side note that he shared with the audience and with a genuine sense of regret, Alexakis kept trying to share with us exactly what those bigger things were. He was getting old and tired. Reflective. To the delight of his fans, he casually shared how grateful he was for the joy that just playing a guitar still gave him. While his band mates bounded about the stage, throwing out their guitar picks to the crowd like it was their first big gig, Alexakis stood firm with more sober messages to deliver.

For everything else Everclear had to say last night, there was a raucous 11-song set launched at us with breakneck speed. Immediately leaping into So Much for the Afterglow before tight, blistering renditions of Everything to Everyone, Heroin Girl and Heartspark Dollarsign, Alexakis straight away offered his microphone to his fans, confident in the devotion of his chorus line. They delivered unfailingly.

With half of their biggest hits thrown into the crowd in the first 15 minutes of the show, this was a band whose generosity was offered back to them. The front three rows of fans barely moved all night. They knew every word and sang them with the kind of nostalgic joy that Alexakis came later to reflect upon.

But as every Everclear fan knows, wherever they position themselves in their audience, there is a darker, more poetic energy to many of their most famous songs. After Heartspark Dollarsign, Father of Mine recalled some of the band's most heartfelt and confronting lyrics. As Alexakis stood there and delivered them, occasionally staring out and above his adoring chorus, he looked as though he was still searching for his answers, as though his absent father might suddenly appear in the back bar. When Alexakis later teased a few fans in the front row, for looking like they were lost, he might have secretly been talking about his own memories.

As if that song had brought the whole band back to their beginnings, Alexakis followed up with another intimate dedication to his childhood, to a mother who should have been there to make his early years easier. "Don't you want to be happy?" he asked her in Sunflowers, disguising these bigger things in his mind behind the thrash of his guitar, "why do you want to be broken?"

Following up with The Twistinside, Amphetamine, Loser Makes Good and Wonderful, the songs were thrown into the crowd like chapters ripped out of an Alexakis memoir. There was anger, there was abandonment, there were decades of drug abuse and confusion that only an unnatural obsession with a guitar and a life on the road might come to cure.

By the time we came to I Will Buy You New Life we were staring up at a man who'd wrestled for long enough with traumas to be able to share them, to sing and finally smile about them. Here we suddenly met Alexakis the optimist, a 61-year-old rock star confessing to us that, alongside his guitar of course, his wife and his kid were the only things that brought him a joy that lasts.

Which is maybe why we were all then so easily urged along, joyously and inevitably, to swim out past the breakers at Santa Monica. By the time we got to that catchy, jangly, nonchalant '90s hit, it really did feel like we were leaving something behind. It wasn't just the past, it was Art Alexakis himself. The rebellious, small-town young punk who now has bigger things to think about.

Rockers Everclear still basking in the afterglow