As James Yuill shuffled on stage in front of a largely empty Concorde, the multi-instrumentalist’s favoured stagewear of skinny tie and jacketless suit – pitched somewhere between a trainee accountant and a nervous 1980s wedding usher – seemed like a uniform for playing the role of underdog.

He thanked his crowd for turning up, then played the polite singer-songwriter as he launched into songs from Movement in a Storm, his new album which has won plenty of praise for adding pop sensibilities to his trademark mesh of electro rhythms and acoustic twanging.

Yuill is frequently accused of creating folktronica, an ugly-sounding term which does little justice to his sound.

He span out understated tales of yearning on his guitar, sampling and reworking his own voice as he went, then nonchalantly arched over his keyboard to rattle off the kind of synth-dance tunes most DJs would kill for.

This ability to combine gentle sparseness and big beat bombast is Yuill’s gift, and the ease with which he glided between the two showed an artist at the top of his genre-hopping game.