Blue Rose Code with special guest Steve Knightley from Show of Hands at St Luke's Church, Southsea | Review

One anonymous club hated it so much that they made the effort to send it back with a Post-it note saying ‘This is not folk music!’, scrawled in red on it.

Wilson, who is Blue Rose Code, gets the last laugh – said club has tried to book him several times since and been given short shrift. The tale serves as introduction to (This Is Not a) Folk Song, a lightly reworked version of ...Love Song from his debut album North Ten.

To mark a decade since that album’s release Wilson is playing it in full in the first half of this show. Originally from Edinburgh, the album reflects the period when Wilson moved to London in a bid to ‘make it’ in the music biz.

With Wilson upfront on acoustic guitar, he is joined by Lyle Watt on electric guitar and drummer Stuart Brown, playing an impressively minimalist kit which has apparently been ‘MacGyvered’ to enable him to put it in a single carry-on suitcase. The songs showcase his strong sense of place and storytelling, as well as a keen sense of the romantic – as he admits, most of his songs are about women. While it is a gorgeous set, Wilson admits he doesn’t always recognise the person who wrote these songs.

To finish the first half Wilson puts his guitar down and sings an incredible rendition of Amazing Grace. There’s something of Joe Cocker in the power and emotion of his delivery – he’s suddenly a different man to the one we’ve been watching for the last 45 minutes.

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The second half features songs from the rest of his career, and while more upbeat, it draws on the same seam of folk, blues and jazz-inflected songwriting.

Fittingly, seeing as we’re in a church, Wilson talks of how intimate gigs like this are a form of ‘secular communion’, and as an affirmed atheist, I can feel where he’s coming from. It’s a prelude to (I Wish You) Peace In Your Heart, as uplifting and cynicism-free a song as you’re ever likely to hear.

He also brings a special guest on stage – Steve Knightley of folk superstars Show of Hands. The pair met at last summer’s Wickham Festival, where both were performing, formed a friendship at the bar and eventually wrote a song long-distance.

Just days earlier Knightley was playing to a packed Royal Albert Hall with Show of Hands, but he turns up here unannounced to give the new song, Remember This Kiss, its live debut and it is as spine-tinglingly stunning as you could hope for. Wilson is clearly and endearingly having a ‘pinch me’ moment, but he is by no means overshadowed in the performance stakes by Knightley.

There’s also a touch of politics – without naming any parties – in another new song, inspired by the awful statistic that one-in-five children in the UK lives in poverty. Its chorus of ‘eating or heating’ is devastating.

Knightley is recalled to the stage for the roof-lifting finale of John Martyn’s Don't Want To Know.

Having had Blue Rose Code recommended to me for years but never managed to see them live, I can now more than see what the fuss is about.