Memphis-born Clarence Greenwood and his alter ego, Citizen Cope, arrived in the UK to find that Londoners are pushovers for southerners with back-roads dust clinging to their authentically raddled denim. Rather like a Tennessean Bruce Springsteen, Greenwood/Cope romanticises the lives of bartenders and gas station attendants, but pumps in a bit of sedition with the homilies.

He's capable of following a rapturous love song with the cast-off-your-chains ballad Penitentiary, which advocates releasing all prisoners and burning the prisons for good measure. His glazed delivery, though, suggested that he won't be leading the charge himself. He'll probably be flaked out at home, listening to the Dylan, Marley and Al Green records that drive his album, The Clarence Greenwood Recordings.

It was a strange fusion that he and his band worked at this sell-out show, but Cope proved the feasibility of lacing a raw-boned folk tune with Marley's Buffalo Soldier, and adding a doleful folk twang to the soulful Sideways (which brought him into US homes when it turned up on the TV show Scrubs).

Hurricane Waters, an oddly prescient funk tango written before the New Orleans storm, seemed to have a particular significance for Cope, who lingered over the refrain "Until the city and county ain't divided, until the scenes of tomorrow and today finally play." It could have meant anything, though, and he wasn't telling. He barely spoke at all, lost in a drowsy, head-nodding world of his own. Yet for someone with such a distinct smell of hippie about him, most of his lyrics were clear-headed, and he sang them with a clarity that was the aural equivalent of grabbing someone's shirt and making them listen.

Cope's views are those of a socially conscious young American, and songs wandered in the directions you'd expect, questioning the efficacy of prisons, brooding darkly about gun culture in Bullet and a Target. Thanks to his sleepy Tennessee warmth, however, it didn't feel like sermonising. One to watch.