Jason Lytle, Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, London

Oh man, this is what I needed; a colossal bear hug of a gig, the comforting embrace of a room where the love for Jason Lytle, from this crowd of checked shirts, slightly greying hair and raised pints, is palpable, tangible. I’d worried the combination of time passed since Grandaddy’s pomp, seeming indifference to both the wonderful solo album and the even better Admiral Radley record plus the dreaded Monday Night Show Syndrome meant it’d be half empty in here. It’s rammed. This is a genuinely rare experience; a room full of people where it feels as if each and every one of us is here to celebrate the occasion.

Look, Grandaddy should have been huge, should have changed more lives, but we can be content with tonight. It’s as if all the people that really cared the most are here, it’s a chance to reclaim these special songs from the vagaries of fashion and the bafflement of popular taste. And Jason seems thrilled, genuinely moved and a little overwhelmed by the response. He says he didn’t know what to expect, he says he didn’t know what to play. Cue a barrage of desperate requests for long cherished moments (‘Levitz, Levitz, Levitz’ I think to myself, employing Beetlejuice triple repeat logic). Mr Grandaddy doesn’t seem to mind, he basks in the warmth, banters back (‘I wish my mum heard you say I was a legend’), and treats us to a hugely generous set of some of the most gorgeously intelligent and heartfelt songs of the last 15 years.

Yes. Levitz. Wow. It’s still so sad, so gentle and poignant; ‘I don’t think I’m gonna miss you much, for I’ve got dials and knobs soft to the touc’’. Radiohead have spent half a career trying and failing to define the whole man / machine / fate / despair / hope / weird millennial paranoia thing, Levitz does it in two easy lines. And makes it sound human. And still relevant. Can ‘Ghost of My Old Dog’ be as literal as it sounds? I hope so, cos if it is he’s played a lament to a much-missed departed hound with as much tenderness as he has the Mark Linkous collaboration Jakub and both are played with huge affection.

‘Hewlett’s Daughter’ is, of course, greeted with gutsy cheers, I sorta think we’re half singing ‘I should have been your son’ at Jason, but, well, the age maths don‘t work out do they? So maybe we’re just thinking he‘d be a great someone to share a beer or two with eh? ‘El Caminos In The West’ is sublime; a rueful, melancholic slice of the ache felt over distance from home and life, and sung with such forlorn wistfulness it’s untrue.

Surely Beetlejuice logic can’t work again? Not for ‘Miner at the Dial-a-View’? Hell yeah. Jason takes the spoken word dial-a-view-instructions, the verses and the chorus and we, as a whole room, take the lonely ‘aaaaws’ and it’s sweet, charming and a really kinda beautiful coming together.

And then he‘s gone, gone to what we have to believe really is a snowbound log-cabin in the U.S. wilderness, to record the new songs we hear tonight, played with the promise they sound better in his head, where he can hear all the instruments we can’t - they sound great already and so we raise one more glass to a man who really is a legend and savour the bear hug tonight’s allowed us.