Could it be for ever? Cassidy fans think so

It was hard to imagine Jackie Roberts, a respectable 41-year-old mother, being hosed down by security guards as she and her friends tore at the fence that separated them from their heart-throb David Cassidy. But that was more than 25 years ago, when Cassidy was one of the biggest teen idols pop music had ever known, and the young Jackie was part of the hysterical throng at White City. Now she was back to swoon over him once again and relive the thrill of an early 1970s girlhood.

"I was a mad person, screaming and crying," Mrs Roberts recalled outside the Apollo Theatre in Hammersmith, west London, on Friday, where Cassidy, now 51, was giving the first of two London concerts that were the culmination of a short British tour, his first for 16 years. "It was his face," Mrs Roberts said. "His eyes. Oh and you mustn't forget his lovely voice."

When 1970s revival acts come along – and hardly anybody who was anybody then has failed to capitalise – they often attract a sizeable number of newer fans, the curious offspring of the people who loved them the first time round. Not David Cassidy. The narrow demographics of Friday's audience – almost exclusively women in their early 40s – spoke of an act that still commands a huge nostalgic following but could surely never enjoy wider appeal. A few women had brought their daughters along, having apparently convinced them that Cassidy had been the Robbie Williams of his day.

"I thought he was excellent," said 11-year-old Natalie, whose mother Brigette, 42, had been deemed too young to see Cassidy 30 years ago. Her friend Ali, who had her 12-year-old daughter Yasmin with her, said she had dreamt she would marry Cassidy; even today she hadn't forgiven him for finding someone else. "I still wouldn't say no."

After a string of hits and the phenomenally successful TV series The Partridge Family, Cassidy turned his back on stardom when he was still in his mid-20s. There were the almost obligatory lost years of drink and drugs, but by the standard of many contemporaries he could hardly be described as one of rock's casualties. His acting career took him to the West End in the 1980s, where he played in Willy Russell's Blood Brothers, and he has latterly starred in a Las Vegas show that has put him in the Barry Manilow class.

Cultural historians don't get much mileage out of a figure whose blandness and sweet smile may have been just what was required after dark excesses of the late-1960s music scene. In The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, a terrifically earnest collection of essays, Cassidy rates only a passing mention, for his role in "the domestication of rebellion".

Nobody at the Apollo on Friday looked as though they had gone in for too much street protest, and Cassidy was likewise true to a self that was nothing more and nothing less than consummate entertainer, mingling romance, charm and self-deprecation in roughly equal measure. He laughed at himself, and he managed to laugh with an audience without ever making them feel embarrassed by their memories. "We want David," they cried, and he noted that their voices had dropped an octave since he was hearing screaming like that in his heyday.

He looked great, younger than his years, in untucked shirt and neatly pressed jeans. And the songs, and the voice, stood up well. "Could It Be Forever?" "I Think I Love You", "Cherish" and "How Can I Be Sure" – testaments to teenage doubt in matters of the heart that took 3,500 people back to a time of sexual awakening. In an act of homage, a pair of knickers was duly thrown at him.

For Stephanie Currie, 44, a veteran of a Cassidy concert at Wembley in 1972, there was only one regret – that a lack of space made her sell her collection of David Cassidy LPs about 20 years ago. So she's been unable to listen to David Cassidy all these years? "Oh no," she said. "I just download the stuff off Napster."