A whole world of life and music and joy spills out of Eddi Reader when she’s on-stage. Halfway through a song she’ll step away from the microphone and play an air violin that only she can hear through the sounds of her band’s accordion, ukulele and guitar. As she does this she is communicating – not in an audio or visual way but almost mystically – the idea that she belongs on that stage, like you imagine she belongs on the dusty roads she sings about in Vagabond or by the creeks of the Burns songs, but most of all in the steamy stout-soaked pub that she has transformed Whelan’s into for the night.

The ease with which Eddi’s voice soars to the high notes is representative of how effortlessly she performs every task she does. When she spins yarns about her family or about coming up in Glasgow she evokes images so vividly that you feel like you’ve been lifted out of the crowded venue and dropped to stroll like a tourist through her past. When she talks about Glasgow it is like some drunken mythical place, like a cross between Tír na nÓg and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row where music runs like rivers through the land and good-natured debauchery is never too far away.

One of the tales she tells is about her time starting out busking in the markets and during it she bursts into an acappella rendition of Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose and her Scottish intonations vanish behind a flawless French accent and demeanour that is typical of how she embodies every song she sings. “People’d give me a few quid thinking I was a wee lost French girl,” she says, which is not surprising as you’d think it yourself if you knew no better.

A wonderful reverence falls over the venue when she sings the Robert Burns songs. A kind of melancholic sing-along takes place during Leezie Lindsay like we’re all mourning a memory none of us have. When she sings Fairground Attraction’s Perfect it is a real crowd-pleaser, but it’s the song The Moon Is Mine that really showcases her spirit. In the song she croons about being poor and finding unfettered joy in claiming “that beautiful ball of cheese” in the sky as her own and really in that moment it’s impossible to think of any more joyous activity than that.

She scowls at the large white clock that lies flat on the stage in front of her, ticking down the precious minutes until she’ll have to clear off and make way for some ill-winded night club whose only purpose seems to be to cut short our good time. The ever-presence of that inevitable doom does make the last few minutes feel a bit like the end of a lock-in, everybody too drunk to keep chatting so they sit and listen with bowed heads to the woman who has started singing. In this atmosphere she sings Burns’ Ae Fond Kiss, as if she plans to ease us lightly out the door, until she and the band burst through Biddy Mulligan and Willie Stewart, defiantly past the allotted time, without any of “that goin’ off and comin’ back on shite.”