It’s an ominously dark day in Glasgow. After last week’s unseasonable heat, we’re back to summer as usual with intermittent rain and apocalyptic clouds. Not ideal for an outdoor concert, but fortunately there’s just one brief, but intense downpour in the break between Vera Ellen’s opening set and the main act. People scatter for makeshift shelter and brollies are popped, but it’s over in good time for the arrival of a tracksuited Aldous Harding and band.

Seated with an acoustic guitar, she starts pensive and reflective with the title track from her brilliant recent album, Train on the Island. ‘I Ate The Most’ follows and ramps up the surrealism with typically enigmatic lyrics and a more jittery sound palette. The sound tonight is excellent, each element ringing out clear and true, especially the keys and Harding’s voice (‘Fever’ is a highlight in this regard), which mingle with the chattering birdsong that surrounds us in this beautiful, leafy setting.

Harding can often be as inscrutable in demeanour as she is in her lyrics, but she seems in a playful, expressive mood tonight. Her grimaces are difficult to make out given the spacious stage, but her mile-wide grins are unmissable. She jokes with the band, and laments the lack of summer (the audience vehemently disagree, it is above 14 degrees after all), but overall charms the audience with her gentle teasing and lowkey dance moves.

The entirety of Train on the Island is played, and every inch of it wonderful, especially the earworm duet with guitarist H. Hawkline, ‘Venus in the Zinnia’ and main set (and album) closer, ‘Coats’, which accentuates Harding’s Kiwi twang on the koan-like chorus: “big thick coats on the dogs of people…just trying to help.” Her voice is a malleable instrument tonight, like on the Joanna Newsom-esque ‘Passion Babe’, but nowhere is it more apparent than on ‘Leathery Whip’, Hawkline providing the Jason Williamson part while Harding reaches into her soprano for the threatening / enticing chorus: “here comes life with his leathery whip.”

A lovely solo rendition of ‘Riding That Symbol’ opens the encore in ruminative fashion, the line “no-one knows what I’m into” delivered with a knowing wink, and it feels like a peek behind the curtain, another crack in the façade that’s been slowly peeling away throughout the evening. Surprisingly and a little disappointingly, Harding doesn’t play ‘The Barrel’ tonight but closes with the excellent ‘Designer’. It’s a somewhat understated set, played to a half-full Bandstand under constant threat of rain, but every moment is perfectly realised and each person on stage plays their part. Harding’s songwriting has reached new heights with her latest album and there’s no doubting the truth of a choice line on the final song, right now she’s definitely “à la mode”.