In the inauspicious surroundings of archetypal Camden indie venue the Barfly, Sondre Lerche - Norwegian, 21, improbably chiselled and floppy of fringe - is playing songs from, remarkably, his second album. He was signed at 17.

Stripped of the deft, lush arrangements that place the record somewhere between Love and Prefab Sprout (of whom he's a big fan) Lerche, with only an electric guitar, performs his delicate songs with such panache that after a while you think that's what missing is not simply a band, but a palm court octet.

He's an extraordinarily gifted singer, sophisticated but unshowy. When his voice lifts naturally into silver peals of falsetto, it's to highlight a melody with perfectly chosen grace notes, not another version of the gruellingly sincere cracked-choirboy pose of the post-Coldplay brigade. In Days That Are Over he swings into a passage of gentle scat singing that's exquisite. We might almost be watching Roddy Frame (whose first, brilliant records were also released while he was still a teenager in the early 1980s) singing Cole Porter. Ben Watt's solo album, North Marine Drive, also comes to mind, beacons from a brief time when a handful of musicians seemed to aspire to the elegance of cafe society, before the wine bar tedium that characterised so much self-consciously "adult" music became the norm as the decade progressed.

"You're very sexy," calls out a man in the audience. "Take your shirt off!" yells another. A couple of more animated songs give Lerche the chance to throw his hair around a bit, but he knows when to stop. Briefly, unrealistically, you wonder what Simon Cowell might make of a talent like this if it were to appear among his teen wannabes. Lerche is a gorgeous reminder that elegance can and should be an integral part of pop music.