Willy Mason is alone with his guitar, centre stage and in the spotlight at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. As the tempo rises his brother Sam joins him on drums and the rest of a band emerges from the shadows around him. The sound swells with the appearance of this lush instrumentation, and Colin Ruel’s lap steel guitar work shines. There are some beautiful tracks played here, like “Gotta Keep Walking”, which crackles with an understated energy, but even this struggles to standout as one song segues too easily into another with precious little to distinguish them from each. It’s all a bit too polished, and there is little to place it apart from any number of folk acts. But where the show starts to go right is from the moment it starts to go wrong. Cracks in the veneer start appearing, but only just enough to let the talent shine through. Indeed, up until the moment when Willy’s guitar breaks, the highlight of the show had occurred when he was offstage, and viola player Nina Violet had taken his place in the spotlight to deliver a single, perfect, folk song. But as Willy struggles to fix his guitar with bits of paper ripped off his set list, he relaxes, chatting with the audience and swigging from a wine bottle being shared amongst his band. He seems more at ease now, and correspondingly the second half of the show assumes a more relaxed air. After the clattering finale the whole band returns to play an exuberant encore before, finally, borrowing Ruel’s guitar, Mason returns. He smilingly jokes that he “forgot” a song, before launching into a climatic, sing-along “Oxygen”. From a workaday opening a thrilling show has now blossomed, as the young man on stage breathes new life into his familiar sound.