It was when the group of intimidating thick-set lager-drinking heavyweights in front of us starting snorting huge amounts of coke from their clenched fists that I really thought we might be in for a rough time. They’d already serenaded the surrounding crowd with menacing football chants as the stage was being reset and now they looked totally out of control, falling around to a wild ‘Ike and Tina’. On stage, mop haired in an unprepossessing blue sports shirt Jamie T (or Jaime Treays to give him his full name) has been kicking up a riot since the first few bars of rockabilly infused ‘Brand new bass guitar’ half an hour before. There are more beer cans flying through the air (most, but not all, in the direction of the stage) than there really should be, and behind me there’s a gang of shrieking girls, well … shrieking and taking photographs of themselves. Actually they shriek most of the night.

I was lucky to hear some of young (he’s 20, which reminds me that although we did see a mum and embarrassed daughter when we left I do believe that this time I was the oldest person in the Pickle Factory) Jamie’s demo tapes about eighteen months ago and was immediately struck by his huge talent. He was accompanying himself on his bashed-up four string acoustic bass guitar, and there may have been some percussion, but songs like Salvador really stood out as being different, not just for the content of the lyrics but the rhythmical structures that they weave.

I begin to think that most of the shrieking girls (they’re not just behind me, they’re all over the bloody place) might be called Sheila, though it’s sadly pretty clear that the irony of songs like this or ‘Operation’ are lost on a large part of the audience, for tonight at least. But Jamie just spits out his lyrics like a machine gun – with almost perfect enunciation as he works his way through twelve songs before returning with another four more.

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