If Dornik Leigh’s professional relationship with Jessie Ware wasn’t already known, you might have guessed it. Until his “private hobby” took off in the shape of his own career as a singer, he was Ware’s drummer, and her tasteful aesthetic is encoded in his shimmering R&B. As with Ware, there’s also a formlessness to his onstage persona: Dornik can sing, Dornik can sweetly seduce – but can Dornik make the girls tweet smutty hashtags by conveying a boundless sexual universe in his body language? That’s standard procedure for Miguel and the Weeknd, to whom he’s been compared, but this show, promoting his self-titled debut album, suggests that the breathy voiced 24-year-old from Croydon is still, in his mind, more drummer than frontman.

To that end, there’s a drum pad next to his microphone, which he taps to add a tick-tock electro chill to Stand in Your Line, one of several songs to have Prince-in-1980s-experimental-mode all over it. This is the one most likely to get bad thoughts percolating in fans’ heads: eyes closed and lips touching the mic, he’s lost in a reverie that’s taken him far from this low-ceilinged basement. Strong also looks back, to Sly Stone’s party funk, but Dornik doesn’t do retro for fashion’s sake – he has a muso’s love for 70s funk, and if he’d been allowed longer than 40 minutes on stage, he’d have undoubtedly launched into bass solos and space-jams.

Bass solos? On Blush, he almost goes the whole nine yards: calling up a feathery, Michael Jacksonish whisper, he extolls “a bad chick, thighs thick” as the band amble through a jazz-funk haze that seems to last forever – in a good way. Despite his indisputable musical strengths, though, Dornik ends the gig having shared little of his personality – something that needs addressing if he’s to join the smutty-hashtags brigade.