Whatever wind it is that blows through the mid-western United States, it blows into the mind and music of Tupelo-born John Murry. His sound is inseparable from that part of the world, like he grew up hearing folk-tales about John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry, queued for hours outside the concert hall whenever Tom Petty was in town and drank beer with Aimee Mann in the pool-halls on a Friday night. His sound is pure Americana, and that wind is the one that blows between the Rockies and the Appalachians over the clubs of Nashville and the dives of the Mississippi Delta.

The band is a classic four-piece line-up and they are not perfect, but they are brilliant, which is better. When John appears onstage his eyes are half-closed with fatigue beneath a black flat cap and the music he plays evokes these images of a sunny but battered and cracked concrete part of America, one that could be any state or city in the country. In this calm and dreary place sits a man who seems unfazed on the outside, barely alive. In the music we hear that he is overcome with torment and sorrow, like the carnival has just rolled out of town and there is nothing left to do and no-one to talk to.

He talks and sings in a nigh-on indecipherable mumble but that scarcely makes a difference and a song like Things We Lost In The Fire makes it explicit why. It starts off downbeat discontented and resigned, but somehow ends up in this frenzied place with the poor dulcimer that has been brought in just for this song screaming in anguish like a dulcimer oughtn’t to be able. To call this music angsty would be wrong, because that word implies that the feelings expressed are merely transitory or put on; with John Murry it feels like he has tapped into that subconscious tank where all feelings of betrayal and loss and abandonment are hidden away. He has liberated them and it is enlivening.

A reshuffle takes place for the encore, and John stands hatless and guitarless at the mic as the piano plays out the opening to Little Coloured Balloons. About half way through this song as John sings “you don’t believe in magic, nobody does anymore” he grabs the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb and looks completely shattered. This only seems to ignite some fire inside him, because he is mesmerising to watch, and when he starts to sing “I still miss you so much” it is impossible to think of six more heart-breaking words. He knocks the mic-stand to the stage in an act that feels more inevitable than melodramatic and storms off as the band continue to play. The crescendo falls and the piano creeps through its final notes, and just as the whole room stands on-edge anticipating that final note to sound and bring the song to a satisfactory close, the piano-player hits the second last note and there is a pause. It holds. It is just silence. The final note never gets played. That is not perfection; it’s brilliance.