THE BEES have not let fame go to their heads. The group from the Isle of Wight have seen their fortunes heading on a gentle upward curve since their charmingly eccentric debut album, Sunshine Hit Me, was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize last summer. But they still made a distinctly low-key entry to the Lyric stage on Wednesday night.

“It’s good that you’re all sitting down,” said the singer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Butler. “This will be a very mellow show, so you can go to sleep if you like.”

Hardly the kind of attitude you would expect from your usual thrusting, young, indie-pop musician on the make, but then Butler and the Bees are a distinctly unusual cast of characters. The dress code was down-at-heel hippy/casual (Badly Drawn Boy tea-cosy hats all round). And once they’d got Warren Hampshire’s organ switched on and Butler’s guitar working, they settled down to perform with a loving attention to detail that was little short of devotional.

The bulk of the set consisted of a performance of their album, played in sequence and almost in its entirety. The opening salvo of Punchbag, Angryman and No Trophy offered an intriguing mixture of ingredients — funk, soul and reggae woven into the most intricate and delicate patterns, yet played with a disarmingly simple sense of purpose.

Butler’s light, airy singing was shored up by the backing vocals of saxophonist Andy Parkin, trumpet player Tim Parkin and guitarist Chris Birkin to produce a sublime layer of harmonies above the neatly stitched syncopations of the bass player Aaron Fletcher and drummer Michael Clevitt.

If it had been released in the days of vinyl, Sunshine Hit Me is one of those albums which would have ended up with Side 1 always on the deck, but rarely Side 2. As the group progressed to the darker, vaudevillian flavours of Sweet Like a Champion and the navel-gazing plod of Lying in the Snow, attention waned accordingly.

Fortunately, they had a string of new songs to lift the spirits at the end. A perky, horn-driven instrumental called Whistle Chop showed great compositional flair. Having alternated between playing guitar, keyboards and trumpet throughout the show, Butler now won his biggest cheer of the night for a brief but scintillating recorder solo.

Jackel Head and These are the Ghosts followed in a broadly similar vein, before Island Loveletter brought the concert back to the mellow mood promised at the outset. It made a delightful end to a show that was all honey and no sting.