Through cosmic lighting, Imogen Heap saunters onto the stage, fingers twirling around the top of a wine glass. "Take some photos", she coos to the sole photographer occupying the press pit, flashing the microphones on her wrists and pausing so he can get the right angle. Suddenly, the glass starts to sing. And somehow, through a plethora of onstage gadgetry, Heap transforms that one resounding note into a song, ‘First Train Home’. The crowd stand motionless, carried away by the otherworldliness of what they’re seeing, not daring to dance, entranced.

That’s how Heap works the night. Floating around the stage through tentacles of wires, she invites sounds from everything around her, feeding it into her machines and making her music. "Bannisters, taps dripping, squeaky floorboards...", she explains to the crowd, "I use any sound". At one point, a band member carries an oversized handsaw onto the stage, strumming it like a violin until it turns into "Swoon", the same song on which Heap uses a children’s plush toy as a complementary sound effect. It’s magical watching the composite layers of Heap’s characteristic ethereal sound slowly growing before your eyes, all unfolding amidst a fantastic lightshow of fluorescent birds and falling leaves. Every number is met with an enraptured chorus of claps and chants from the crowd.

But if Heap’s music takes the crowd away, then it’s her personality that brings them right back to Earth. On ‘Bad Body Double’, Heap bounces around the stage alongside her own doppelgänger, in the form of a male band member clad in a long brown wig, whilst on final track, ‘Tidal’, she dons a pair of sunglasses, straps herself into her keytar and gets onto her knees. All the machines may suggest artificiality and distance, but Heap certainly doesn’t let the computerised electronica shield her from the crowd. Between songs, she reveals her humanity, jovially telling stories of locking French teachers in cupboards as a girl. Who says Grammy-Award winning artists need come burdened with egos?

Inevitably, when it’s all over, the crowd demand her return. Seconds later, Heap is back on stage. "I’m still slightly awkward about encores", she tells the crowd. But if this is true, she doesn’t show it, for here, Heap does something truly breathtaking. Abandoning her backing instruments, she launches into ‘Just For Now’ a cappella, using the crowd itself as her rhythm by getting each part to sing in turn, and layering their collective vocals with her own. At the end, there’s a sense of accomplishment in the air. "Genius!" one fan screams. Couldn’t have put it better myself.