Plush's Liam Hayes isn't a man who does things easily. He released his first single in 1994, his first woozy LP in 1998, and didn't follow that up until 2002's Fed, an orchestral album of Brian Wilson and Randy Newman-like proportions that almost bankrupted him. Last year, he released Underfed, the demos for that record. Add a cameo in Stephen Frears' High Fidelity - he plays at a fuggy bar's piano, allegedly at the request of fellow Chicago-dweller John Cusack - and Hayes' reputation as one of contemporary music's strangest, perhaps laziest, most compelling performers was cemented.

The 12 Bar club feels like a venue stuck in time - which suits Hayes perfectly. In sports jacket and sharply creased slacks, topped with a curly mop, he resembles a young Albert Hammond. And his songs, too, seem to come from another era. He feeds his guitar through a Leslie cabinet, the antique tremolo unit through which the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and the Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps gained their mournful hum.

His first tune, an instrumental, laced with "doo-dooh" phrasings and thick jazzy chords, swoons like a soundtrack piece from a lost arthouse film. The songs that follow are full of the early 1970s charm of Paul Simon and Neil Young, as if sung by a voice of the counterculture.

Only three songs Hayes plays have been previously recorded, but with lyrics this touching ("I guess we walk together into this life") and melancholy ("I had a place I didn't know/I called it home"), it doesn't matter. There's briefly some swampy blues when one song urges "Come on down, the price is right", but the mood that prevails longs for love. It's hard not to warm to his wishes.