Watching Stewart Lupton stagger, swagger and slur his way through a 40-minute set with his new band, one realises, first, why his former bandmates in Jonathan Fire*Eater tolerated him so long, and, second, why they sacked him, just as the New York band were on the brink of the breakthrough that eventually went to the Strokes.

The rest of that band went on to a major-label deal as the Walkmen. But Lupton has only this year, after a decade in the wilderness, re-emerged with Childballads. Without Lupton, Childballads would be an unexceptional Americana outfit, mining the same seam as the Rolling Stones did on Exile on Main Street: a wracked country-blues that never gets above brisk walking pace.

But Lupton's performance elevates his band beyond pastiche. Within seconds, the microphone stand has disintegrated in his hands, and he slithers into a tangle of cable and metal. Within a couple of songs, shoes come off and are thrown across the stage, socks come off and he writhes and shakes, painting colour into songs that are little more than sketches. He is lost in his own world, which is just as well given that only 30 or so people have come out to see him.

There is an uneasy sense of voyeurism about the event: in a crowd this small, you feel you are staring rather than watching. But by the the final song, Laughter from the Rafters, Lupton is shirtless and carousing, and his band crack their first smiles of the evening. They slink off without hint of an encore, and Lupton goes to look for his shoes.