J Mahon @ The Hug & Pint, Glasgow, 23 Jan

J is for… Jocelyn? As the tenth named storm of the winter season bombards Glasgow with high winds and heavy rain, it’s a tricky night for troubadours with a new record to promote. Nevertheless, J Mahon has encouraged a few hardy souls to battle through to The Hug & Pint, and their bravery is rewarded with a charismatic, dynamic set which falls frustratingly short of its promise. But first, local support Jock Fox offers an intriguing blend of 80s rhythms and staccato vocal delivery which comes across a bit like a happily malfunctioning replicant from Blade Runner. 

There is a new romantic slant to J Mahon’s look too, his puffball shirt and tousled jet-black moptop landing somewhere between New York Dolls' Johnny Thunders and the Manics' Richey Edwards. His delivery is softer, though, and his slightly awkward banter with the crowd between songs is in sharp contrast to the confidence with which he swaggers across the stage, guitar swinging around him like a matador’s cape.

The songs fall in classic powerpop territory, with an Aussie twang that might almost bring to mind The Go-Betweens, albeit with a more raucous edge. For the most part, he mines his debut album Everything Has a Life, and tracks like All I Know get a chance to truly shine in a live setting. He teases a Senseless Things cover which never comes, but in truth his own songs are the draw, and there are even a couple of tracks from a new album to be released later this year.

If you squint your eyes, he has it all – the strobes and the smoke machine get even the most windswept punter up on their feet; he has the hair, the look, the voice, the threads. All he’s missing is a band. And while the backing track he plays along to has many advantages – no long gaps waiting for the bass player to argue with the sound guy about his monitor – it feels as though J Mahon is going to need a gang to riff off to truly bring the songs to life. The pre-recorded tracks sound too clean, and too similar to the album, with no room for spontaneity or freedom. There’s a weird moment of reality when he begins a song with his capo in the wrong position and has to restart, and it’s an irony that a few more mistakes like that might have given the set the looseness that it needed to breathe. 

As we shuffle into the Glasgow gloom, rain and wind howling around us, there’s a sense that the lightning which J Mahon brings to the stage needs a few like-minded thunderbolts to take it to the next level.