As an expansive crowd snaked round the perimeter of the Corn Exchange in advance of the show on Sunday night, a small band of buskers played in the corner of the Guildhall. Eventually attracting their own crowd of customers from The Cow and passersby, it was a fitting opening to an evening with a musician who, until recently, was very much part of the busker fraternity.

       Seasick Steve is no innocent, and on Sunday night he expertly exploited the niche of the deconstructed blues player. With no support act and a few scantily draped fairy lights for a stage setting, the projected message was clear: the blues is a dish best served pure, and delivered by an individual possessing the necessary shaman-like qualities only obtainable through a lifetime of hand to mouth hardship.

His opener, ‘Man from Another Time’, played directly into this mythology, Steve placing himself in an bygone golden age of bum-dom. Denying all pretentions, he claims that “all I can keep doing is playing what’s in my heart”. With his baseball cap and checked shirt (soon removed to reveal a wife-beater), his allusions to his time spent in “an institution paid for by the government”, and a claimed preference for tractors over Ferraris, Steve worked hard to convince that he is the ultimate American hobo. What was unexpected for the cynics, however, was his disarmingly gentle charm which gradually works its way into even the most hardhearted the startling conclusion that Seasick Steve could actually be genuine.

His “junk-yard” of homemade instruments such as the Diddley Bo, replete with a functionless Chevrolet door-handle and dangling Christmas decorations which, by his own admission, “don’t sound very good”, combined with his Hillbilly body jerkin’, foot tappin’ and stooped-back stalkin’ across the stage are infectiously likeable.

   His life story was told with accompanying blues licks. The war-scarred step-father who used to “beat up on” him and his brother and the induced homicidal thoughts stayed only by a revelation. His eventual decision to leave home aged 14 and live rough were all concluded with a personal triumph that proved engaging and emotionally involving: “I don’t get spare change now!”

By the end of the show, when the house lights came up, no one in the sold-out Corn Exchange could doubt that Steve is as good a candidate as any to sing the doghouse song.