In his brief but promising career, James Carrington must already be fed up with being compared to David Gray. But Carrington never really approximates Gray's distinctive forlorn quality, and a better comparison might be to Tom Baxter, another soft-rock troubadour with a penchant for big, flowery melodies.

Although there's a large and growing audience for this kind of music, no record company has yet tried to bury Carrington under a mountain of loot. He has built his following through old-fashioned legwork at London venues such as the Camden Underworld, Bush Hall and the Borderline, and has set up acoustic nights at the Bedford in Balham. The fact that he could pull a decent crowd to Ronnie Scott's (most of whom seemed to know him or a band member personally) in the chilly wasteland of early January hinted that Carrington mania may not be far off. Salman Rushdie was sitting near the stage, and seemed to be enjoying himself.

Carrington's problem, if that's what it is, may be that he leans too far towards soft-centred, easy-listening music, conforming to a recognisable formula but rarely stretching beyond it. With his band in tow, he's capable of kicking up a bit of a rock-style racket, as he demonstrated with Now That You're Gone, or the elongated exercise in dynamics of Changing Lanes (complete with screechy cosmic lead guitar). But his default setting is more in the bedsit-melancholia area. The title of the statuesque Slowly describes it pretty accurately, while Carrington prefaced the gentle and bittersweet No Man's Land with the observation that "You can't always be happy - but you try."

The performance was in aid of the tsunami victims and would have fulfilled its function equally effectively without the tepid piano piece Carrington had written for the occasion. Nevertheless, there's a buzz hovering around him, and you'd have to bet on his stock rising in 2005.