Mayer Hawthorne’s major appeal is his recreation of hip-hop’s pet fascination with soul, funk and R&B with blissful production on his first album, A Strange Arrangement.

The sounds emanating from the ex-comedy club Metropolis are audience-friendly: good old-fashioned rock’n’roll overtones, tight, true to the album and generally well received.

However, the disappointment is that that’s it. Ticking the fashion checklist written by Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air - geeky glasses, white suit and silk scarf, and matching preparatory school red sweatshirts for the band - characterized Mayer Hawthorne as a disingenuous, unoriginal fashion victim, by pandering to retro-fashion without producing soulful music you can believe and relate to.

The band’s superb vocal harmonies and the more soulful tunes are well worth investigating, yet the evening failed to parallel the hype that has surrounded this musical polymath.

Jon Wiltshire