Jamie T feels the love

With his hoodie, carefully torn jeans and designer trainers, he looked ready to spend the evening toying with an asbo but Treays was a beguiling mix of The Streets’ Mike Skinner with his elegiac rapped stories such as 368; Billy Bragg, when he strummed the acoustic Emily’s Heart, and The Neptunes when he and his not entirely heart-stopping band The Pacemakers merged thrash metal with speed rap on the anthemic Alicia Quays and the thrilling Northern Line, which presumably he won’t be playing at weekends for the next 17 months.

A master of merging the seemingly simple with the eyebrow-raisingly complex — The Man’s Machine had all sorts of intriguing layers beneath its whopping stadium-house chorus — there were hints of calypso on Sheila and English folk on the mandolin-led Spider’s Web.

He’s truly loved. The crowd — joyfully frenzied, not least in knowing that they’d backed the right horse in the pop stakes — hollered along to everything. And for all his hubris in announcing "if you don’t like the songs being played fast, go home and listen to the records", he oozed down-to-earth humility, allied to a casually earnest charm akin to Mat Horne’s Gavin from Gavin and Stacey and immediately before the solo Back in the Game, Treays received a lengthy ovation just for being there.

Once, it seemed unlikely that the appeal of Jamie T’s London-centric world would extend beyond the M25. Now, after two sparkling albums and shows like this, nothing seems beyond him. For one JT at least, these are the very best of times.

Jamie T
02 Academy Brixton
SW9