John Power, sporting a full untamed beard, opens his set with an epic 15-minute whimsical folk song which mentions weeping willow trees and seems to be a paean to a pastoral way of life which exists only in the imagination.

Power looks and sounds as if he’s been living on a croft in the Outer Hebrides for the past 10 years.

In fact he lives in Hackney where there may well be an urban farm but his sun goes down over Clapton Road and not the picturesque hill over, the way he sings about.

After half an hour of rural whimsy and some fine fingerpicking guitar work a ‘tune’ we recognise appears.

It’s ‘Sandstorm’ from his better known Cast days 20 years ago.

The crowd cheer and it’s evident most of us have really come to hear the old stuff.

There followed Fine Time and Get Up – slightly ironic as most of us were sat down around vast circular tables.

Unfortunately the acoustic versions of the hits only highlight how good they sounded originally.

They provide fleeting memories of the heady optimistic years of Britpop.

John’s voice is still a fine instrument and the vocal harmonies worked well with his collaborator Jay but his voice was clearly straining towards the end.

After an hour he duly announced they were going to play two more songs and then finish – no encore for us.

Luckily one of them was ‘Alright’, my favourite but the title pretty much summed up the evening for me. Let’s hope a reformed Cast decide to come down this way on their next tour.