You can’t deny that Richard Hawley provides value for money. It’s just 7.45pm and the Tramshed is full as none other than Bernard Butler, his support slot for tonight, takes the stage to deliver a one-man performance of material from his new album and back catalogue.

We get some of the big numbers from People Move On, and from his collaboration with David McAlmont, all delivered in a kind of husky, Midwestern purr, which, while it’s been compared to Springsteen, sometimes strays amusingly close to the best a man can get. But it somehow works, even if there’s something objectively funny, not to say actively subversive, about a former Britpop icon singing in a Yankee accent. Butler’s playing is never showy and every detail of every solo, every flourish, is in the service of his storytelling. It’s a masterclass. Great hair too. 

The newer material survives contact with the chattier sections of the audience, particularly Deep Emotions – which feels appropriately heartfelt, painting a self-portrait of man who can be moody, even highly strung, but who tries his best to be true to himself; and if that’s how it is, it seems to be working out OK for him tonight. He affably suggests that he should play in Cardiff more often. Yes, Bernard, please do, we want more.

Enter Richard Hawley, a rock’n’roll colossus in a sharp white jacket and shades. The first song, She Brings The Sunlight, goes in hard and heavy, followed by a menacing lurch into Two For His Heels from latest LP In This City They Call You Love. Hawley’s songwriting skills are solid gold: Two For His Heels swaggers about like we’re not 25 years into the artist’s solo career, and that’s not even counting his earlier stints with Longpigs and Pulp.

A tune like Prism In Jeans (also from the new album), for example, possesses a lucidity and simplicity to the melody and lyrics that recalls Bacharach & David at their most effervescent. There’s a quality of innocence to the work, such that it doesn’t even seem like work. These sound more like songs made up on a sunny day in the car, or the brilliant and unselfconscious musings of a child. Absolutely joyful and bursting with an infectious feeling for life.

Hawley plays a mixture of ballads with more straightforwardly rockier stuff. Topics covered include walking home pissed in Sheffield, a comparison of the vastness of the universe with the equal enormity of human subjectivity, and a couple of murders. Now and then he veers into psychedelia or new wave, but never strays too far from a kind of northern English Americana: Get Carter at an Everly Brothers reunion, if you will. Whatever he plays, Hawley is absolutely enthralling tonight, completely in command. 

He’s backed by a great band and there are some thoughtful arrangements in evidence. If Hawley is an enthusiastic exponent of the guitar solo, he’s also got one eye on the detail of what’s going on around him. 

Hawley also has an inordinate number of guitars to share with us – keeping the techs busy as he croons his way from one apparently effortlessly great song to the next – and a sign that says ‘Welcome to Sheffield’. The city inspired his latest album’s title track, which he performs as part of the encore: by then, he’s reminded us that his wife comes from Cardiff and noted the historical and sociocultural parallels between south Wales and the industrial north of England, before playing what he describes as possibly the quietest song he’s ever written.

In This City They Call You Love thus takes on a metaphysical quality: the generalised, polite plural ‘you’ of the song transmogrified by this alchemical figure of speech into the living embodiment of Eros. Or perhaps it’s all just a way of talking, that’s the mystery of it.

Richard Hawley + Bernard Butler, Tramshed, Cardiff, Mon 2 Dec

words COLIN BOND photos EMMA LEWIS