When Damon Gough does a back-to-the-roots tour, he does it in style. The Spread Eagle is the London stop on his unadvertised national pub crawl, and - around the corner from a strip club and eminently deserving of the word grimy - couldn't be a better place for Gough to connect with a fanbase that is more long-suffering than most.

While technically more man than Boy, Gough retains an impishness that makes japes such as stuffing several hundred people into a room built for 50 seem a terrific idea. It also offered a chance to get unusually cosy with a songwriter who has risen against the odds to largeish-venue status.

The proximity makes the crowd especially indulgent of Gough's trademark amateurishness. He has long made a feature of forgetting lyrics and stopping songs in the middle because he's bored with them, and he is on good form here. Easy Love, from the just-released One Plus One Is One album, has the makings of a lounge classic, until he stumbles to a stop and says: "Can't remember it."

A bit later, rollicking through an upbeat number from the About a Boy soundtrack, he squeals to a sudden halt when he decides he's more in the mood for the homespun charm of 40 Days and 40 Fights.

You've got to love him - and everyone here does, howling at his Bolton-accented bon mots and pressing so close that Gough is only visible as a woolly hat and hideous sidewhiskers. The fact that he is becoming a writer of stature is clear from the way the beautiful Silent Sigh and Once Around the Block sparklingly survive both the tinny PA and Gough's non-singer singing. The quality of his songs almost supports his claim to be "the new Bono - only younger and better-looking".

What Bono hasn't got, though, is Badly Drawn Boy's intimacy. The divide between Boy and audience is so narrow that we could be sitting in his living room, urging him on through the improvised autobiographical rap Walkmen Demo. In it he says he "doesn't feel the need" to perform live any more. Hopefully, that, like his other one-liners, is a joke.