Ben Christophers, Borderline, London

"It doesn't change anything," says Ben Christophers near the start of this solo comeback show, after he is welcomed like a long-lost, much-loved friend: "I'm still nervous."

"It doesn't change anything," says Ben Christophers near the start of this solo comeback show, after he is welcomed like a long-lost, much-loved friend: "I'm still nervous." His diffidence only makes him more endearing, although he has no cause to be nervous.

The last two years have seen the Shropshire singer-songwriter lose his major-label deal with V2 and fetch up on an independent (Cooking Vinyl), but as the title of his forthcoming third album, The Spaces In Between, suggests, his is a cultish proposition anyway. Poised between the likes of folkies such as Tims Hardin and Buckley, and the mellifluous oddness of Kate Bush and Talk Talk, his songs have always been that bit too delicately elusive to impact on the mainstream.

They're evidence of a sturdy talent, though, none the less. "Maybe love's a vapour trail," Christophers sings on "Songbird Scrapes the Sky", and if that's the case, he catches its wispy flight like few others can. Played solo and largely acoustic tonight, these are eerie, spaced-out folk songs of the purest longing, wrapped up in enigmatic samples and dipped in honeyed melodies that hint at things you remember but can't quite place. Frequently, he turns to spooky-beautiful nature imagery to illuminate his contemplations ("I only find sense in the wilderness," he sings on his new single, the jauntily despairing "Good Day for the Hopeless"), in the process rendering his song-poems of love extraordinarily vivid.

That he more than gets away with any ripeness of imagery is due to the mix of his elastic, angelic voice with similarly supple songwriting. His vocal manner carries hints of Thom Yorke at his most yearningly rubbery, but it's warmer, more modest and, on his new material, more huskily intimate than the Radiohead singer's. On the desperately beautiful "The Drinking Tree", it hangs in the air, gossamer-light, like the ghost of the absent singer the song refers to. On his new album, too, an increasing lightness of songwriting touch finds him having fun with his talent for spectral lovesick lullabies, from the self-confessed "dumb blues" of tonight's opener, "Devil to Kill", to the spaciously catchy "Everybody Stood to See Us". "Walked a lonely street of skeleton grins/ A needle full of empty things," he sings, brightly: "But all along we were OK."

He only loses his footing slightly on the atypically rocky "Stay", where crunchy samples crush the song a little. Come the encore, though, he could be floating off the ground as, relying on just that otherworldly voice and an acoustic guitar, he lets the sweetly besotted, winningly naked lyric of "Sunday" linger sublimely: "Don't say, don't say, I'll see you after Sunday/ 'Cause it seems too long to waste away the time."

Like the meeting with whoever he's craving, the next gig from this strangely magical, shyly brilliant talent can't come too soon.