THE theme of Basildon blues diva Alison Moyet's new electronic pop album The Minutes is that you learn as you grow older how the minute matters.

Not every minute, but special minutes that stand out and are to be cherished amid the mundane and the minutiae.

“Jump too soon” and you miss the possibility of “beautiful minutes”, she muses on Filigree. How apt on a night when Alison was announced for an 8.45pm start but arrived on stage ten minutes later, and was well worth the extra wait.

The other extra weight has long gone, of course, Alison, now half the Alf she used to be in Yazoo, whose electronic template is revisited on both the album and in a live show that draws on 30 years of Moyet music both past and up to The Minutes.

Electro-music has its limitations in visual presentation, but a less-is-more policy has worked ever since Karftwerk's Teutonic minimalism, and it works again here, with stars-at-night back-lighting and banks of repeated images behind Alison, in black with a Thirties bob, and her two men and their machines.

Occasional guitar and more regular backing vocals furnish what Alison calls her “electronic palette”, and just as she did with Vince Clarke in Yazoo, she brings warmth and sensuality to what can be a chill framework.

Nineteen songs could not be better picked, old and new feeding off each other as the pick of The Minutes seamlessly flows with a slower, bluer Is This Love, a darker, more possessive new arrangement of Only You, a glorious Love Resurrection and full-house-on-their feet renditions of Eighties club anthems Situation and Don’t Go.

“Middle-aged, don’t care,” is her new mantra at 52, as she concisely and precisely explains why she won’t perform Invisible despite repeated requests, insisting that “I don't want to do any song that makes a woman feel like she doesn't count”.

It is one of her beautiful minutes, unexpected and forthright, on a night of many magical moments.