Shed a tear, people, Brighton’s best live band played its last gigs at the weekend. And, if you missed the back-to-back shows at the Komedia, shed a bucket, because they played probably their finest sets ever.

Now if this was Seattle or New York, these guys would be leaders of an internationally-known genre. We’d be calling their groundbreaking, joyously life-affirming blend of storytelling, rock and any other musical style they put their multi-instrumental hands to Hat-Hop, Bowler-Bop or maybe just Fedora. But as frontman Dan Clark observed at one point, it ain’t easy to make money out of music in this country. So, on the very weekend of their album launch (gig-goers to these shows got a free copy) they also hung up their collective hats.

And it’s not right or proper because, from the off, it was clear the band was, at the very end, still growing, still trying out new things, and still getting it right.

On Friday they opened with their signature song Open Heart, usually a quintessential Hat weave of rock and talespinning that here they turned into a scat piece for four voices. In fact, in the first half Clark slowed down his normal machine-gun vocal delivery, the band turned down the volume so we could appreciate the words, and the music had space to breathe.

And ballads? Yes, The Hat do ballads. Rather beautiful ones, at that.

But after we’d all fuelled up at the interval bar it was back to their full mental jacket-style of gloriously strange songs performed with the gas pedal to the floor. The scatological banter between Clark and his confreres, drummer and singer Dave Sanderson, bassist Buster Cottam, and Dave Stenhouse on everything from guitars to toy xylophone, was a loose, improvised comedy act. But, when they played, this band were as tight as a nut.

Finally they got down from the stage, made space for themselves in the crowd and played their encores unplugged while the loose cannon that is Sanderson volunteered an amazed young woman for some crowd surfing. Their exquisite heartstring-tugger Falling brought things to an end. And it’s little surprise the trumpet solo at the end of the song defeated Clark – it was a moment of high emotion.

I just know that, while everyone there left sad in their hearts it was the end, they walked six feet off the ground for having known The Hat. Thanks guys, you were legends.