Porcelain Raft, The Castle Hotel, Manchester

Playing any show and missing out your most famous song is always a risk, whether you’re playing the back room of a pub or a several thousand seat concert hall. Mauro Remiddi, stage name Porcelain Raft, has always been a talent befitting of playing the latter, but for the minute his lush, one-man-orchestra sound has to settle for playing a boozer’s spare room – though the majesty of The Castle Hotel’s space is hardly the sticky floored hell that the tag implies.

Those who managed to get there early saw the much hyped Oupa, side project of Daniel Blumberg of Yuck. Even when bus timetables and bad luck conspire to make sure you only catch the final refrains of his set, it’s clear to see that he’s a talented soul, no matter which guise he takes. The day job requires him to rehash grunge for a generation not au fait with Mudhoney and their ilk, but this a much more tender beast, and the rapturous applause that greets the end of his set only serves to make you hate Stagecoach Manchester even more.

In the break between sets, you can see Mauro darting about, and it’s only really when he takes to the stage that he appears to truly settle down. Surrounded by a cornucopia of peddles and switches, he heads off into a 40 minute set unguided, choosing tracks seemingly as they come to him. At one point he provides his own interlude, gazing to the ceiling and playing through a few chords as he decides what to play next.

There’s a lot of new material, and it all fits in seamlessly – there’s less looping and a lot more piano than earlier material, but where others may slip into singer-songwriter territory, Remiddi remains challenging and engaging, avoiding cliché even when singing in his second language. There is no room for the excellent ‘Tip of your Tongue’ in his meandering set – something that may be linked to the desperate cries of ‘more’ from the 50 or so people battling the humid conditions in the room – but the performance doesn’t suffer because of it. The track that earned his breakthrough, garnering praise from almost every influential blog and magazine the world over may clearly still be his best work, but it’s absence serves to prove the quality of the rest of his repertoire. This may have been a gig in the back room of a pub on a warm Monday night, but on this basis, the packed concert halls shouldn’t be quite as far away as they seem.