Singer, fiddle player and songwriter Eliza Carthy is clearly at home on stage. Having been performing since she was a teenager, she can confidently put an audience at ease and let her music speak.

Carthy is a renowned interpreter of traditional song, but self-penned material is the focus of her current tour, and the bulk of her set was taken from current album Neptune. It is her most coherent, mature record yet – and it worked neatly live. Backed by keys, accordion, bass, cello and drums, Carthy used her powerful, husky voice to great effect on songs like the melancholic Tea At Five.

Not that it was all downbeat, though, as she joked, “There are miserable ones, and deceptively happy ones with miserable lyrics”. The joyous cabaret stomp of Blood On My Boots told a disturbing tale of a West End premiere, while War was dancey, irresistible pop about Friday night fighting.

Elsewhere, Carthy replaced the mariachi trumpets of noir seduction fable Mr Magnifico with some furious fiddle playing and cajoled the audience into a mass whistle-along for the ska-influenced Monkey (“about a monkey riding a donkey”, we were told).

Her superb, sensitive band shone, providing impressive vocal harmonies as well as instrumental prowess, particularly on Britain Is A Carpark, which blends bucolic traditional song The Oak And The Ash with a Latinate vision of a future in which all Brits live in Spain and eat chips. It would have been a great way to end the evening, had she not pulled heartbreaking finale Thursday out of the bag. Wonderful stuff.