Laura Veirs had two excellent warm-up acts to follow.

Rachel Myers, a Brighton-based singer/songwriter, sang lovely melodic songs that featured strong poetic images and a finely finger-picked acoustic guitar accompanied by a single electric guitarist.

Stand-out tracks were Icarus and her new single, Heart Sails.

Emiliana Torrini is probably best known for the Gollum song from The Lord Of The Rings films and her fine album from 1999, Love In A Time Of Science.

This concert began a tour to promote new album, Fisherman's Wife, which is due in January. Torrini, despite the Italian name, is Icelandic and both her elfin good looks and waif-like voice are reminiscent of Bjork.

However, her songs are more delicate, complex and exquisite and thus very difficult to sing.

She is very shy on stage and appears to sing with an almost pathological determination to get everything right. But it was worth it.

She has previously supported Sting and is billed to support Terry Callier soon but it shouldn't be long before she headlines her own tour.

When Veirs finally came on stage at 10.15, we felt all girl-singered out.

But Veirs has plenty of stage presence so the audience warmed quickly to her.

This was the third gig in a seven-week tour and many of the songs from the album Carbon Glacier, which has been out since April, were interesting but felt stiff.

When she called for requests at the end of the evening, she had to confess she couldn't play most of them.

But on the two she did play, Tiger Tattoos and Devil's Hootenanny, she suddenly loosened up and the final encore, Rip Tide, which closes the current album, was a tour de force.

Performed in a voice reminiscent of Suzanne Vega and Iris Dement, her hypnotic mountain songs about swimming in lakes with a fine range of accompaniment from Steve Moore on trombone and electronic keyboards and Karl Blau on guitar and electronic effects end up sounding like a kind of trance-folk.