It seems likely that if you close your eyes while listening to Jose Gonzalez's songs, you will forever see the myriad, brightly coloured, bouncing balls from the advert that catapulted this quiet, undemonstrative musician to international fame. That the song used, Heartbeats, is tossed off early in the set suggests Gonzalez may be trying to slough off the association; that it is a cover has lead some people to suggest his best songs are other people's (his new single is a version of Massive Attack's Teardrop).

Alone for the first five songs of the evening, however, Gonzalez proves himself a singular musician. He plays his nylon-stringed acoustic guitar with a mix of delicate picking and powerful, percussive strumming that is not quite abrasive, but too forceful to be simply pretty. The melodies of his own songs seem subtler than those of the covers he picks, but then the bossa nova tradition, whose influence surfaces occasionally in Gonzalez's writing, is one that eschews melodic showiness. It is also easy to forget, in the age of X Factor, that to be a great interpretative singer - someone who knows how to choose and bring something new to a song that may already be well-known and much-loved - is a rare and special talent. Crosses, an original song from his first album, gets the biggest cheer of the night.

What hobbles him is the band, or what passes for a band: two musicians playing superfluous percussion - bongos really are the last refuge of the worst kind of acoustic troubadour. Gonzalez is a virtuoso musician and needs another virtuoso to spark off if he is to fill bigger stages; his songs offer the rhythmic and chromatic repetitions that are the perfect launch-pad for improvisation. He is replicating the formula that made his name, but he needs to challenge himself. What he does next will be more interesting.