It's appropriate to find David Viner in a comedians' venue: his reworkings of traditional themes and musical styles are filtered through varying degrees of irony and pastiche. He seems to base his approach on the subversion of "authenticity" - he has a record label called Loog (as in ex-Stones manager Andrew Oldham) and he records at an establishment called Toe Rag studios. And that "Mr" stuck permanently in front of his name could become seriously irritating.

Hence, Viner puts his credibility on the line every time he appears in front of a crowd. The Comedy Pub plays into his hands by being a boxy, low-ceilinged room crammed with beer-drinkers and chain-smokers, meaning that Viner and his band are only intermittently visible as they bob above a sea of heads. It's like being whirled back in time to 1964 and the Beat Boom era, when scruffy English bands were playing primitive blues and R&B in dungeons all over London.

Viner's set mixes episodes of coherence and stripped-down grittiness with outbursts of bathos. From time to time, the band lock into the kind of lean, steel-sprung rockabilly reminiscent of the stuff Johnny Cash used to play with his Tennessee Two, but then they spoil it and lapse into a particularly bovine species of cod-English folk music, trundling along like a hay-wagon negotiating a rough track.

Viner's songs offer their own lopsided take on such popular topics as love, death and drinking. In Grape and Grain, the band slouch along like a jug band. For This Boy Don't Care, they assemble a brisk skipping beat (happily without the flute included on the recording) as Viner sings the words in his purest north London dialect. In Nobody's Business, he summons a throaty rasp to go with the band's R&B stylings, while Seven Years successfully resurrects something of the spookiness of a traditional folk ballad. But for the present, the artifice is outweighing the artistry.