It’s the second day of his UK tour and BC Camplight has just sprung on stage to rapturous applause, wearing own his merch – an ‘I’m Desperate’ tee.

BC Camplight has nailed the frankness of hosting a jarred, anxious mindset, and the absolute pride of it all.

His latest record, ‘Deportation Blues’ has been out since the end of August, and seems to have been a bit of a breakthrough ahead of the sizeable autumn tour we find ourselves ensconced within at Leeds’ more upmarket-than-scuzzy city centre venue The Wardrobe (although, scuzz has kinda happened here before, kinda, polished scuzzy).

6Music-adorned ‘Deportation Blues’ rings out before “I wrote this about Leeds…*pause*…joke…” beckons the intro to ‘I’m In A Weird Place Now’.

Lamenting BC’s (Brian’s – his first name is not Camplight but is Christinzio, which is a shame as that’d be a quality surname) nightmare situation of living in Manchester before being deported back to his hometown in the USA, finding himself living with his parents, and forcibly leaving his life and love behind in the UK, the new record is both dark and in parts, hopeful. Just like tonight’s set.

Brian, by the way, ended up getting Italian citizenship (hey, EU), but of course with Brexit looming, we might be looking at ‘Deportation Blues Part Two’ for a future release. He likes to play in dim lighting, this is a reoccuring theme tonight, as the lights go down down down. It’s not a packed show, it’s buzzing, and that seems to suit both the band and the album’s arrangement just right.

With a six-piece band, the whole act before us feels more widescreen, and right now much suited to smaller stage than say The Great Escape where we saw them last, where the stage felt too big, or maybe being in a room full of industry bigwigs talking over your set is enough to piss anyone off? And it’s a little less party than our first outing with them near-closing 2016’s High And Lonesome festival.

And they’re comfortable. “This is called, ‘I Once Killed My Dog'”, Brian referring to his pupper Frankie between swigs of Oyster Bay from the bottle, before of course, some heckle of “is that why you were deported?”, to the gentle intro to ‘When I Think of My Dog’. There’s band introductions, there’s “My mum didn’t breastfeed me as she liked me as a friend,” there’s a drummer in a sequin jacket. And there’s ‘Fire In England’, dedicated to Theresa May.

“Do you know what ‘Camplight’ means? I don’t even know where that came from…” We don’t, either, but the dark room and singular spotlight on our frontman sure has cosy campfire feels.

The jolly, bouncy ‘Thieves In Antigua’ from BC’s 2015 album ‘How to Die in the North’ is next – 50s rock-and-roll reminder of a happier time, before immigration officials, before finding yourself playing Pac Man in your folks’ basement wondering what the hell happened.

“Can we make it pitch-black?,” Brian shouts to the lighting engineer in a bid to recreate the environment within which ‘Deportation Blues’ was written. It is time to get bleak, and get bleak is what we shall do.

A brief encore comes as the well-BBC 6Music-played ‘I’m Desperate’, which is just as anxiety-inducing with its swirling hook played almost in the perturbing semi-blackness, before we’re left with the realisation of how BC Camplight has turned the very shittiest of situations into a goddamn excellent record.