Guy Garvey courts the squall in cosy surroundings in Manchester

These days, it’s arenas up and down the land, so this solo jaunt, taking in the likes of this place and Shepherd’s Bush Empire, is a rarely-afforded opportunity to catch him in low-key surroundings again.

Interestingly, playing in a venue that feels as intimate as this one almost robs Garvey of one of his recently-developed party tricks; part of the magic of post-Seldom Seen Elbow shows has been the way in which his affable manner manages to make even the most soulless of corporate-sponsored enormodomes feel cosy. He doesn’t need to do that tonight, partly because of the size of the place and partly because, by the looks of it, the place is half-full of his mates anyway. Elbow are scattered amongst the audience, so a day-early chorus of “Happy Birthday” is in order for their keyboardist and producer - briefly rechristened ‘Old Bastard’ rather than ‘Craig Potter’ - whilst his brother Mark, guitarist with Elbow, opens the show with his bluegrass side project, The Plumedores.

Garvey’s own solo material, which surfaced on Courting the Squall back in October, isn’t as far removed stylistically as Potter’s, but there’s certainly a departure from his usual fare. Instrumentally, the sense of sweeping drama that’s so often the band’s calling card is stripped away, with experimentation instead order of the day; erratic synths shoot through the raucuous “Angela’s Eyes”, Bond theme brass backs an almost spoken-word vocal turn on “Belly of the Whale”, and “Juggernaut” takes an Elbow melody and dresses it up in unlikely clothing - there’s harmonica, and there’s harp.

There’s enough on the setlist tonight (4th December) to distinguish the show from an Elbow gig, then, even if a handful of the tracks - “Harder Edges” and opener “Three Bells” spring to mind - could probably comfortably have slotted onto their next LP without anybody batting an eyelid. They key difference, of course, is that Garvey’s put a new band together - his best mate Pete Jobson, of I Am Kloot, is on guitar, The Whip’s Nathan Sudders handles bass duties and prolific session man Alex Reeves is behind the kit. Garvey mentioned, when I interviewed him a couple of months ago, that he expected the tour to be "absolutely piss funny", and that’s how it comes off; a bunch of mates enjoying each other’s company, just up on stage, rather than down the pub. There’s hiccups - a couple of restarts early on, and the slightly strange decision to allow Jobson to deliver a couple of his own numbers mid-set - but they’re not, ultimately, the evening’s take-home points.

After all, this is Garvey we’re talking about, a man who trades in sentiment as if it’s a currency that might go out of circulation at any minute. Potter joins him for the evening’s sole Elbow cut; “Great Expectations”, one of many love songs set in unremarkable surroundings by Garvey - the 135 bus from Bury to Manchester, in this case - is printed on the setlist, but he instead opts to deliver a knockout rendition of the beautifully sad “Switching Off”. There’s poignancy, too, to his cover of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” for the encore, as he acknowledges the aching simplicity of the song’s appeal in an uncertain world. Another rambunctious run through “Angela’s Eyes” closes the show; with Elbow reconvening for their next album in January, it’s the last time for a while Garvey’ll be up on this kind of stage. You suspect he’ll be back in one form or another before too long, though; he’s an institution around these parts, and there’s a mutual love between band and crowd tonight that goes a long way to explaining why he never seems to be able to drag himself away from Manchester for very long.