JESCA Hoop doesn’t do conventional. The American singer-songwriter has swapped Californian sun for Manchester rain – “Why? Everyone asks me that,” she says – and announces she will be playing a schizophrenic set.

Before a sense of alarm creeps in, she clarifies: “The songs aren’t schizophrenic, but the neighbouring ones will make them feel schizophrenic.”

Suddenly she starts recalling her mother’s first experience of pot and how the subsequent phone call under mutual influence led to Jesca writing the only song on pot that she has gone to record: new single Whispering Light.

Such a rambling, yet enchanting preamble instantly reveals much about Jesca Hoop: a natural confidence in performance, faced by an inquisitive full house when her debut album is yet to break out of the cult box.

“Okay, here’s some songs,” she says at last. Hoop is joined by a female harmony vocalist, with whom she indulges in call-and-respond bird song, eschewing obvious choruses, much as Coldplay do. It is this vocal quirk, along with minimalist drumming, that compounds Hoop’s reputation as the “Lady Gaga of freak folk” – oh, that and singing into an old telephone at one point or chanting “the gods of rock’n’roll hypnotised my stereo”.

A second guitarist adds to Hoop’s regularly changing configuration, hence the “schizophrenic” tag for a gig whose two sets accommodate an off-the-cuff Dylan cover, Tangled Up In Blue, and close aptly with the fascinating, fantastic Hoop all alone, singing a cappella.

The rest is silence, no encore needed.