Nadia Reid @ Portico Library, Manchester, 3 June

Tech gremlins threaten to unseat Nadia Reid just minutes into her Manchester debut but she’s entirely unfazed. While others examine leads and connections, Reid steps down from the stage and plays her second song, Runway, unplugged and deep in the heart of the audience. It’s an unplanned detour and it bonds performer and (an affectionate, sell-out) crowd, and she stays there for one more song: a hypnotic Track of the Time.

Reid’s 2015 debut Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs is decorated sparingly, and her songs employ space and a trim poetry to form their connections. As tonight’s performance confirms, whether they’re coloured by guitarist Sam Taylor’s warm tremolo or delivered alone, they document a captivating journey. She shades her rich melancholy with care: these are sad songs but they measure their losses with courage. When she breathes “in the shadow of the doubt that meets the morning / I have come, I have known,” you think: yeah, the heart does go on.

“Oh, the stars they are a’ fading,” she sings on a new, untitled song and alongside Holy Low, a deeply moving Some Are Lucky and a closing Call the Days, (where Reid returns to the floor), they fill the Portico with a warmth and a beauty befitting of its history and stature. The shelves behind her labelled ‘Polite Literature’ are a wholly inappropriate backdrop for Reid’s fiery catalogue, but the ‘Voyages and Travels’ section – well, that’s a different story.