The comic archetype of the angry but impotent middle-aged male often crops up in novels by writers such as Martin Amis and Will Self. Now he is being chronicled in rock music thanks to the efforts of Nick Cave, whose new album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is a rude shriek of disgust at a world where girls won’t look at you and “tomorrow is obsolete”.

Preceded on stage by his backing band The Bad Seeds, Cave entered to blood-red lighting and grinding, clunking noises that suggested a descent to hell. The grimly repetitive bassline and screeching guitars of opening track “Night of the Lotus Eaters” continued the illusion, reminding us of the days more than 20 years ago when the pale, bequiffed Cave ranted and raved and gobbled opium with the ferocity of Thomas de Quincey.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is a parody of the wild Cave of old. On “Night of the Lotus Eaters”, the 50-year-old imagines himself as a lizard-like exhibit in an aquarium where people “come in their hordes to tap at the glass”. “Be kind to me,” he admonished the audience after finishing the song.

The tracks that he and the band debuted were cacophonous garage rockers, with two drummers thrashing out a beat as a guitarist conjured raucous sonic squalls from his instrument. A heavy, swirling organ replaced the piano chords of Cave’s gentler work.

Cave’s performance was a mixture of intensity and theatricality, all barked baritone vocals and wolverine howls. He looked in great shape, but the combination of long black hair, floppy moustache and a shirt open to his navel appeared deliberately preposterous, like a tongue-in-cheek homage to a vanished species of rocker.

There is, of course, something inherently preposterous about a 50-year-old singing primal rock songs, as Cave registered when he changed the lyrics of one of his new songs to sing, “Rock and roll concerts and tiny children too/Don’t it make you feel blue?” There has always been a degree of humour in his music but now it lies closer to the surface than ever. This most literary of songwriters, with a novel and several film screenplays under his belt, has reinvented himself as a satirist.