It’s fair to say that Nelly is not the commercial force that he once was. Fifteen years ago, the Missouri rapper’s debut and breakthrough album, Country Grammar, topped the US charts and sold more than 8.5m copies in that country alone. His last offering, 2013’s MO, shifted just over 20,000.

Faced with these diminishing returns, he could easily retire to count his money, but appears instead to be adopting a laudably back-to-basics approach to his career. This show, in a compact club in the bowels of the cavernous arena that he was headlining just a few years ago, is a stripped-down affair with just a DJ and a hype man. When it ends, he is off to play a DJ set in Croydon.

The staging may be minimalist, but the performance is far from perfunctory. Lithe in his trademark leather jacket, shades and baseball cap, the 40-year-old Nelly is animated and engaged tonight, embellishing Country Grammar (Hot) with a staccato rap thrilling in its velocity and dexterity, and turning Ride Wit Me into a deliciously languid slice of cool braggadocio.

The Neptunes soundscapes that underlay many of his series of millennial pop-rap hits still sound fantastic, while My Place is so soft-edged that it almost verges on lover’s rock. The slick between-song patter is clearly well-practised, but the delicious sex-groove of Hot in Herre remains so luscious that you freely forgive its side order of cheese. When he pulls four women from the crowd on stage to duet and smooch with him, they text and take selfies furiously as huge invisible “OMG!” thought-clouds form over their heads. Nelly’s arena-filling days may be gone, but maybe intimate club party nights are where he was best all along.