9:00 pm, there they are. Wandering on stage to take their positions. They’ll start sometime… Bloody hell! How many of them are there?

Singers/guitarists, bassist, drummer… yeah… string section, keyboardist… okay… more strings, trumpeter…and other assorted people. Ready yet? Right, we’re off.

It looks like amateur-indie open-mike night, or something. Except this is Brixton Academy, and we’ve paid the best part of twenty quid to see it. Disappointed? Oh cheer up, you miserable bastard! Because as soon as they start playing, you realise just why there’s so many of us mini-Belles and mini-Sebastians here. No NME-hype or anything, oh no. To put it simply, they are ACE!

They work their way through a set of more-familiar songs (The Boy with the Arab Strap, you know it, the one that plays at the end of Teachers), less-familiar songs, and not-familiar-at-all songs (I mean new ones). They exchange instruments, nervous glances, and remarks with the audience about how there are ‘more people here than at the Royal Albert Hall’. You really think it isn’t right. But when they play little masterpieces like the last single I’m waking up to us or The state I am in from the first album Tigermilk, there’s no hesitation or screw-ups. Well, not too many. Then you see that it’s not some kind of weird fantasy. Belle and Sebastian are brilliant, and they play brilliant songs, brilliantly.

That goes on for half-an-hour or so. Then Stuart starts to tell us a little story about when they were stuck in a traffic jam and started talking about Blue Peter. Where could this be going? Oh, I see, it’s a four-piece steel band!

B&S leave the stage and we get a somewhat bizarre rendition of No Woman No Cry. Pointless? Maybe, but it’s cool! And fun! And interesting! Just like the whole gig. I’d have thought that’s as good a reason as any.

The steel band leaves to huge applause and the set continues. We’ve been led through a Flamenco-style handclap on a fantastic Spanish-tinged new song. Flowers are thrown on stage. Stuart throws his microphone about and dances in a rather uncoordinated manner like an over-excited kid. Hey, we all are, aren’t we? Then he gets out a rather funky transparent bass and they play Legal Man. They run across the stage at each other. We cheer, dance and sing, and it’s as simple as that for the whole evening. In fact, the only possible criticism is that they don’t lose it quite enough. Like I said, if you want a lesson in serious musicianship you should be watching Nickelback. Alright, you shouldn’t, but what I mean is that you shouldn’t be here with that kind of attitude. That’s not Belle and Seb’s game. Haven’t you learnt that by now?

They end the night with a brilliant cover of Another Girl, Another Planet. Musically stuck too deep in the past, possibly, but it’s so completely without cynicism from everyone that even if you wanted to you couldn’t go against it for fear of being left out. There’s not much you can say, except that we’re here to enjoy ourselves, they’re here to enjoy themselves, and we do indeed enjoy ourselves. Anyone not-smiling when we leave gets… well, something bad anyway.