The sideburns are still there and the cheeky grin is never far away, but this was a very different Gaz Coombes to the teen who shot to fame in the 1990s.

Older and wiser, his music now is heavier and darker than the pop songs he is best known for as Supergrass’s frontman. His new material is less accessible but showed a musician enjoying experimenting and tackling more serious topics.

His opening number Bombs, which is also the opener for his new solo album Here Come The Bombs, was a good example – heavy guitars backing a paean to the suffering of citizens trapped in warzones, performed with Coombes eerily lit in red. As he worked through much of the album, the songs Whore and Simulator stood out as similarly powerful.

They were punctuated by a couple of covers of some of his favourites, Mirror In The Bathroom by The Beat and Gang Of Four’s Damaged Goods, and there were a couple of Supergrass tracks, Moving and Sitting Up Straight, as an upbeat encore.

This was a good intimate gig and a nice occasion for Coombes as he returned to the city where he lived for much of the 1990s and 2000s.