His Easter Island features, his Eraserhead coiffure and his courtly manner notwithstanding, it’s hard to know just what is most improbable about Lyle Lovett: that he got to briefly marry Julia Roberts (and, more impressive still, marry her after she became famous) or that the 51-year-old’s skewed, literary but loving take on country and bluegrass is as sharp as it was almost a quarter of a century ago, although even then he neither looked nor sounded young.

He’s ridden the new country boom of the mid-Eighties and the rise in Americana. Now he finds himself an elder statesman of cerebral country.

Thrill-seekers hoping for high-octane pyrotechnics (or even some proper lighting) would have left disappointed. That Lovett loved us and left us to a standing ovation spoke eloquently enough of the bond between act and audience. As it was, Lovett and his four besuited sidekicks simply stood in the murk for over two hours and delivered some songs.

Yet these were mostly fine songs, exquisitely delivered and their author emerged as not merely a charming host, but one with devastatingly deadpan comic timing. Along the way, he offered relationship counselling (“men want to do the right thing; we just have no idea what it is”), he teased both his material (“the best songs can stand being long,” he noted before the whimsical Penguins, “this is short”) and his fellow Texans.

The Grateful Dead’s Friend Of The Devil was covered with gleeful abandon; Steven Fromholz’s Bears with due reverence and Lovett cheekily incorporated Beethoven’s Ode To Joy into his Don’t Cry A Tear, though he was soon wryly reminding us that “I fear we’re running the risk of being too happy this evening”.

Mostly though he tackled and tickled his back catalogue, stumbling only when succumbing to pubby honky tonk. If I Had A Boat and Walk Through The Bottomland were reminders of his pioneering Eighties work, the divine Church featured a cello solo and his honeyed voice made the traditional Ain’t Got No Cane seem more dark and gothic than ever.

An understated craftsman in a world of glitzy hacks.