Can you all go and buy T-shirts from the foyer?" Leslie Feist asked her sold-out crowd between songs. "Go on, we'll wait here." Nobody moved. They didn't want to miss a second.

Stealthily, the Canadian indie songstress has nurtured a devoted cult. Last night she commanded pin-drop silence during her quiet numbers and synchronised handclapping, stomping and general hysteria with her poppier flourishes.

If on latest album The Reminder she's "gone commercial", as some po-faced fans of Broken Social Scene (her sometime colleagues) and Peaches (her ex-flatmate) have suggested, she's done a lousy job of it. To have an audience this rabid and a single as hot as My Moon, My Man, and yet remain the only musician outside Peter Andre not to make the UK Top 40 this year is some achievement. It will happen though and hopefully before the vogue for all things Canadian is has passed.

With a band whose touch is so deft one imagines they renovate Turners blindfolded in their spare time, the 31-year-old former punk choirgirl knew here she could take vocal risks.

Whether cooing acrobatically over looped birdsong or joyfully yelling the hooks of I Feel It All or 1234, she was relaxed and playful.

The voice was Amy Winehouse without the lazy mumbling, Cat Power with confidence. Singalongs were conducted; banter was ironic and borderline irksome. When she focused, her guitar playing was as economically pungent as Steve Cropper. What raised her above her peers, as ever, was her awareness of old soul music's slinkier side alleys.

Her best song, The Limit To Your Love, sounded like The Chi-Lites if they'd devoured the seminal Miss America album by maverick Toronto legend Mary Margaret O'Hara (surely a Feist role model).

Likewise, Brandy Alexander oozed restraint and class. Surely her quality will tell, and those T-shirts will fly.