Fifteen months ago, Seth Lakeman was playing the support slot at the Empire. Now he's headlining the venue, packed to the gills with a young, demanding crowd, and there are touts outside offering buy-or-sell tickets for a folk gig. It's been one hell of year for the young pretender.

But pretending is a word far from this fine musician's vocabulary. In a masterful hour-and-a-half set, in which he gave the lion's share to the songs from his recently vaunted Freedom Fields LP, and spurred on, no doubt, by his Mercury nominations, numerous BBC Radio 2 awards and signing to a major record label, he exuded confidence, brilliant musicianship and a smattering of swagger.

Taking to the stage with pyrotechnics, he swung his fiddle to his chin and backed by the consistently tight bass playing of Ben Nichols, rocked through the Riflemen of War.

He sang with the commitment of Robert Plant and was supported by a band that had Led Zep-style rock in its blood. Stamping his foot on the stage, he produced a thumping sound that drove the band and the crowd into a pact of spirited revelry.

With a set and sound so tight you couldn't put a Rizla between the beats, Lakeman switched his fiddle for, variously, a four-stringed guitar or banjo.

The music cut from Plymouth drinking songs to ballads made the more poignant by his sensitive playing of dynamics - no better displayed than in the solo encore Send Yourself Away, where the crowd couldn't contain their enthusiasm for their hero.

He and the band rocked out in the final encore, or "hoe down" as he put it, of Race to Be King. It was a peerless performance from a rising star.