Grant-Lee Phillips @ The Deaf Institute, Manchester, 20 Apr

Grant-Lee Phillips takes to the stage of The Deaf Institute just about smiling from ear to ear. He couldn’t be more pleased to see the audience and they, in turn, could not be more pleased to see him. “We’re old friends,” he says. “We go way back.” And it’s true – given the cheers that greet many of the songs he plays from his extensive back catalogue, and the fact that some of the singalongs drown out the lion-voiced man himself, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally stumbled into a secret gig by someone immensely more famous than Phillips currently is.

Looking like a youngish Lloyd Bridges, he dashes out a half dozen corkers from his new album Widdershins – songs that show he’s every bit as politically engaged as he once was (show opener Walk in Circles and King of Catastrophes both feel pointedly Trump-fixated), married to a warmer folksier sound than he would have dabbled with back in the 90s as part of Grant Lee Buffalo (Miss Betsy is a stand-out). We also get a half dozen songs from his Buffalo days, and they are greeted joyously – especially Jupiter and Teardrop and Fuzzy, the first song of the encore which was once released by Bob Mould as a seven inch.

Grant-Lee Phillips is a well-kept secret these days, make no mistake, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s happy as a clam, making some of the best music of his career, and if the dates on his current globe-spanning tour are anything to go by, adored by just enough people in a whole bunch of cities to ensure he keeps on keeping on. Which is good news as far as we’re concerned.