A fresh-faced 25-year-old Californian and so well adjusted (or so sheltered) that her father and her father’s defiantly Sixties coiffure are an integral part of her band, Alela Diane Menig operates in the new-folk female singer-songwriter hinterland, where voices are strong, songs slightly quirky and Joni Mitchell remains revered.

Last night’s covers, Fleetwood Mac’s Gold Dust Woman and the hardy folk perennial Matty Groves, just about bookended her territory, although she’s also a less maverick Dido with the vocal clarity of Joan Baez, herself no stranger to Matty Groves.

Even so, Alela Diane is her own woman and sufficiently knowing to colour what might have been a monochrome palette by performing solo and with any or all of her worryingly hirsute four-piece band.

She announced that this is the last concert to be held at St Giles-in-the-Fields before rhapsodising about the church’s beauty. It was beautiful, but, unlike much of her audience, Alela did not spend her evening in God’s house shuffling uncomfortably on the devil’s own buttock-bruising pews.

But her own songs were mostly balm and Oh! My Mama was a beautiful evocation of three generations of maternal love. Yet the percussive The Ocean bubbled with undercurrents of malevolence, the country-flecked To Be Still was all lost love entwined with war metaphors but what darkness she aspired to was trampled underfoot by her natural sweetness.

And her patently proud father? “Well,” she chuckled, “he’s really cool as it turns out.” So is his daughter. As it turned out.