Jack Garratt, The Basement, London

“I was gonna walk off for the encore, but I just wanna keep looking at you guys,” chokes crooner Jack Garratt, through a tangle of russety facial fluff. “I hope you had a good time tonight,” he continues, to deafening applause, the loudest hollers from the back of the room belong to his mum and dad, sporting their son’s merch proudly. “Then my work is done,” he grins, before taking one last plunge into his ocean-deep pop-soul repertoire with the pulsating ‘Worry’, his deep, rasping utterances peeling away to reveal that remarkable falsetto again - at once quivering and completely controlled.

It wasn’t the easiest of journeys to this point of rapture for Jack tonight, though. Stooping over keys - he handles all the other instrumentation on his own, too - for browbeaten torch-song opener ‘I Couldn’t Want You Anyway’, Jack cuts an imposing, if a little shaky figure. He’s slicked with sweat and wailing, “don’t need reminding I’m your worst mistake” over a soaring wash of garbled atmospherics and synths which sear and sting like love turned sour.

Plenty of beats flutter in and out of time tonight, but that’s part and parcel of being a one-man-band; especially one which has played only a handful rooms as bustling and tropically sticky as the London Edition’s swanky basement. He’s plagued by technical issues, too: “I literally don’t know what I can do because I don’t know what it is that’s broken,” he groans, strapping on his guitar for ‘Water’. It’s safe to say no-one else is perturbed. Picked notes flutter like bees’ wings, flanged basslines wob-wob like sweltering jelly, and the audience writhe along with Jack’s lyrical hooks - screwed-up and raked-out like scorched coals, burning with desire and subsequent rejection.