The kickdrum reads Lemar. The backcloth declares Lemar Lemar Lemar. The 10-piece band is playing a funk jam with the sole lyric: "Lemar!" Although he has given us a portentous disembodied voiceover, Lemar Obika is yet to appear after five minutes and the screaming from the 80% female audience is reaching uncomfortable levels. Have the Brit award and platinum sales of his debut album gone to his head? Has the Fame Academy runner-up become a preening, narcissistic egomaniac? It's all very exciting.

When Lemar - "Lemar!" - finally does make himself known, it's an anticlimax. A sleek 25-year-old with cornrows and an impeccable black suit/red hoodie combo, he certainly looks the part of an R&B casanova, and his souped-up old school soul is well-crafted. But it seems as though he refuses to risk jeopardising his hard-won credibility with anything overly charismatic. He wants us to know that he is not like the other reality TV fly-by-nights. He is authentic - crushingly, tediously authentic.

The best R&B requires a kind of priapic flamboyance, but Lemar has the polite, neutered sexuality of the boy band, forever promising to "treat you right". Evidently a nice guy, he frequently appears at a loss as to what to say between songs. "Are there any good women here?" he asks by way of introduction to Good Woman. "Is everybody hot in here?" he cries before Hot Summer. This is a very literal man.

The teenage girls down the front love him, of course, especially when he whips off his vest, but he doesn't have the conviction to be a lothario. No sooner has the vest gone than he has exited stage right for a costume change. A cover of the Darkness's I Believe in a Thing Called Love exemplifies his problem. He sings it beautifully, finessing the song's falsetto chorus and cheesy chat-up lines into an R&B ballad, but where's the sense of fun, of showmanship, of excess? Not here.

Lemar Lemar Lemar is dull dull dull.